📖 中文版本：README

Here, base on the model NIMA^[1] (Neural Image Assessment), proposed by Google, and the Siamese Network^[2], a Siamese NIMA neural network is used to optimize the ablity of model fine-grained ranking.

The ability of NIMA model to assess image quality depends on the innovation of training mission and the designing of loss function. It uses EMD^[1] (Earth Mover's Distance) loss function to optimize the predicting ability of score distribution, rather than simply solve a multi-classification problem.

As NIMA learns the image score distribution, it use AVA^[3] (A Large-Scale Database for Aesthetic Visual Analysis) dataset, which contains a lot of aesthetic images and 1 to 10 user voting results, as its training samples.

Through the design of the training samples and loss function, NIMA can successfully percept the image quality in general. But if we also want it has better ranking ability, we have to make some optimization on NIMA model while training. Therefore, here comes Siamese NIMA. It utilize the advantages of siamese networks to futher optimize NIMA networks, so that the model would obtain the ability of fine-grained ranking.

Structure of the Siamese NIMA is shown bellow.

While training the model, we first use the AVA dataset to bucket the image mean score, then create a list of pairs of samples and labels. After that, we can reuse the NIMA network and share its weights across the siamese networks, in order to minimize the loss of model ranking distance.

TL;DR: pre-trained weights have been uploaded on Releases, please download the corresponding weight file according to different purposes and place it into the directory ./assets/weights/ (optional).

The weight file of InceptionResNetV2-based NIMA model is provided by titu1994^[4]. Making use of this pre-trained model weight as a part of Siamese NIMA, we can simplify the processes of model fine-tuning.

Based on the pre-trained weight of NIMA model, we freeze the bottom layers to retain the model's general ability of image expression and unfreeze the rest, in order to optimize the ablity of model fine-grained ranking. In this way, we can obtain a good model even the training dataset is not big enough. By default, the freezing layer is set as layer_to_freeze=618.

After training, we can take apart NIMA from Siamese NIMA and save its weight directly, so that when we are trying to predict a batch of images with the model, we can only build a single NIMA model and load its weight.

If we really want to re-train a new model with Siamese NIMA, we can leave nima_weight_path empty while training. However, in this way the model won't optimize the EMD loss function. In other words, the shared part of the network is a pure InceptionResNetV2 model instead of NIMA model, which lacks the perception of image quality assessment. In this cases, we'd better first train a new NIMA model and pass the file path of the weight into the training procedure, then continually fine-tune it with Siamese NIMA.

Todo.

Model training and predicting are done on AWS EC2 server. Due to the complexity of whether the physical machine has a GPU and the GPU version, the following major environments are listed bellow for reference. For the deployment guidance of the major environments, please refer to Deployment of Running Environment.

• Physical environment：
  • CPU version ：4 * Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2686 @ 2.30GHz
  • CPU memory：64GB
  • GPU version：1 * Nvidia Tesla V100
  • GPU memory：16GB
• Running environment：
  • python：3.6.5
  • keras：2.1.6
  • tensorflow-gpu：1.12.0
  • numpy：1.15.4 (Notice: newest version may not be compatible with tensorflow backend)

Different OS have different installation guidance. For details, please refer to https://www.python.org/downloads . For recommendation, the version of Python should not be lower than 3.6.

Check existing version or check whether the installation is succeeded or not, run:

# Python 3.6.5
python3 -V

git clone https://github.com/ryanfwy/image-quality.git
cd image-quality

Since tensorflow backend has some compatibility issues with its dependencies, it is highly recommended to install dependencies in the virtual environment.

For Anaconda:

conda create --name image_quality python=3.6
source activate image_quality

Or for general environment:

python3 -m venv .env
source .env/bin/activate

1）To avoid compatibility issues, Tensorflow 1.12.0 is recommended.

For CPU only:

pip install numpy==1.15.4 Keras==2.2.4 tensorflow==1.12.0

For GPU:

pip install numpy==1.15.4 Keras==2.2.4 tensorflow-gpu==1.12.0

2）The rest of environments:

pip install -r requirements.txt

If you don't need any customization, you can use installation.sh script as a quicker way to install dependencies.

Notice: Ensure that GPU driver is installed successfully before running the script, otherwise the script cannot read the GPU version correctly.

bash installation.sh

If you need to train the model by yourself, you need to prepare the downloaded training images and the data file in advance. The data file should contains at least two columns: file name and label. Take Demo for example, the directory tree and the data file should be prepared just like described down bellow.

Image samples directory:

./train_images
 |- 267683.jpg
 |- 774992.jpg
 |- ...
 |_ 1246918.jpg

Data file train_data.csv:

file_name label
267683.jpg 1
774992.jpg 2
775717.jpg 0
953019.jpg 4
953619.jpg 6
953958.jpg 3
954113.jpg 8
954184.jpg 7
954228.jpg 5
1246918.jpg 9
...

If additional data is used for training verification, image directory and data file can be prepared as same as the method described above, and pass the result to argument val_raw while invoking the train() method.

For training script, please see demo_train.py. For more training arguments, please refer to fit_generator.

from model.siamese_nima import SiameseNIMA

# dirs and paths to load data
train_image_dir = './assets/demo/train_images'
train_data_path = './assets/demo/train_data.csv'

# load data and train model
siamese = SiameseNIMA(output_dir='./assets')
train_raw = siamese.load_data(train_image_dir, train_data_path)
siamese.train(train_raw,
              epochs=5,
              batch_size=16,
              nima_weight_path='./assets/weights/nima_pre_trained.h5')

While using the Siamese NIMA model for prediction, in addition to preparing the predicting images, the data file and its loading method must be modified also: the data file must contain at least one column of file name.

For predicting script, please see demo_predict.py. For more predicting arguments, please refer to predict_generator.

from model.siamese_nima import SiameseNIMA

# dirs and paths to load data
predict_image_dir = './assets/demo/predict_images'
predict_data_path = './assets/demo/predict_data.csv'

# load data and train model
siamese = SiameseNIMA()
predict_raw = siamese.load_data(predict_image_dir, predict_data_path,
                                columns=['file_name'])
results = siamese.predict(predict_raw,
                          nima_weight_path='./assets/weights/nima_pre_trained.h5')
print(results)

[1] NIMA: Neural Image Assessment. [Paper] [Repo]
[2] Siamese Network. [Demo]
[3] AVA: A Large-Scale Database for Aesthetic Visual Analysis. [Refer] [Repo]
[4] neural-image-assessment. [Repo]

This repository is licensed by MIT.