Weights from Conv Layer when applied to image layer gives saturated output - machine-learning

Question

I am visualizing my first layer output with image_layer when applied with trained weight. However, when I try to visualize, I get white images as follows:
Ignore the last four, the filters are of size 7x7 and there are 32 of them.
The model is built on the following architecture (Code Attached):
import numpy as np
import tensorflow as tf
import cv2
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
% matplotlib inline
model_path = "T_set_4/Model/model.ckpt"
# Define the model parameters
# Convolutional Layer 1.
filter_size1 = 7 # Convolution filters are 7 x 7 pixels.
num_filters1 = 32 # There are 32 of these filters.
# Convolutional Layer 2.
filter_size2 = 7 # Convolution filters are 7 x 7 pixels.
num_filters2 = 64 # There are 64 of these filters.
# Fully-connected layer.
fc_size = 512 # Number of neurons in fully-connected layer.
# Define the data dimensions
# We know that MNIST images are 48 pixels in each dimension.
img_size = 48
# Images are stored in one-dimensional arrays of this length.
img_size_flat = img_size * img_size
# Tuple with height and width of images used to reshape arrays.
img_shape = (img_size, img_size)
# Number of colour channels for the images: 1 channel for gray-scale.
num_channels = 1
# Number of classes, one class for each of 10 digits.
num_classes = 2
def new_weights(shape):
return tf.Variable(tf.truncated_normal(shape, stddev=0.05))
def new_biases(length):
return tf.Variable(tf.constant(0.05, shape=[length]))
def new_conv_layer(input, # The previous layer.
num_input_channels, # Num. channels in prev. layer.
filter_size, # Width and height of each filter.
num_filters, # Number of filters.
use_pooling=True): # Use 2x2 max-pooling.
# Shape of the filter-weights for the convolution.
# This format is determined by the TensorFlow API.
shape = [filter_size, filter_size, num_input_channels, num_filters]
# Create new weights aka. filters with the given shape.
weights = new_weights(shape=shape)
# Create new biases, one for each filter.
biases = new_biases(length=num_filters)
# Create the TensorFlow operation for convolution.
# Note the strides are set to 1 in all dimensions.
# The first and last stride must always be 1,
# because the first is for the image-number and
# the last is for the input-channel.
# But e.g. strides=[1, 2, 2, 1] would mean that the filter
# is moved 2 pixels across the x- and y-axis of the image.
# The padding is set to 'SAME' which means the input image
# is padded with zeroes so the size of the output is the same.
layer = tf.nn.conv2d(input=input,
filter=weights,
strides=[1, 1, 1, 1],
padding='SAME')
# Add the biases to the results of the convolution.
# A bias-value is added to each filter-channel.
layer += biases
# Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU).
# It calculates max(x, 0) for each input pixel x.
# This adds some non-linearity to the formula and allows us
# to learn more complicated functions.
layer = tf.nn.relu(layer)
# Use pooling to down-sample the image resolution?
if use_pooling:
# This is 2x2 max-pooling, which means that we
# consider 2x2 windows and select the largest value
# in each window. Then we move 2 pixels to the next window.
layer = tf.nn.max_pool(value=layer,
ksize=[1, 2, 2, 1],
strides=[1, 2, 2, 1],
padding='SAME')
# norm1
norm1 = tf.nn.lrn(layer, 4, bias=1.0, alpha=0.001 / 9.0, beta=0.75,
name='norm1')
# Note that ReLU is normally executed before the pooling,
# but since relu(max_pool(x)) == max_pool(relu(x)) we can
# save 75% of the relu-operations by max-pooling first.
# We return both the resulting layer and the filter-weights
# because we will plot the weights later.
return layer, weights
def flatten_layer(layer):
# Get the shape of the input layer.
layer_shape = layer.get_shape()
# The shape of the input layer is assumed to be:
# layer_shape == [num_images, img_height, img_width, num_channels]
# The number of features is: img_height * img_width * num_channels
# We can use a function from TensorFlow to calculate this.
num_features = layer_shape[1:4].num_elements()
# Reshape the layer to [num_images, num_features].
# Note that we just set the size of the second dimension
# to num_features and the size of the first dimension to -1
# which means the size in that dimension is calculated
# so the total size of the tensor is unchanged from the reshaping.
layer_flat = tf.reshape(layer, [-1, num_features])
# The shape of the flattened layer is now:
# [num_images, img_height * img_width * num_channels]
# Return both the flattened layer and the number of features.
return layer_flat, num_features
def new_fc_layer(input, # The previous layer.
num_inputs, # Num. inputs from prev. layer.
num_outputs, # Num. outputs.
use_relu=True): # Use Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU)?
# Create new weights and biases.
weights = new_weights(shape=[num_inputs, num_outputs])
biases = new_biases(length=num_outputs)
# Calculate the layer as the matrix multiplication of
# the input and weights, and then add the bias-values.
layer = tf.matmul(input, weights) + biases
# Use ReLU?
if use_relu:
layer = tf.nn.relu(layer)
return layer
# Create the model
tf.reset_default_graph()
x = tf.placeholder(tf.float32, shape=[None, img_size_flat], name='x')
x_image = tf.reshape(x, [-1, img_size, img_size, num_channels])
y_true = tf.placeholder(tf.float32, shape=[None, num_classes],
name='y_true')
y_true_cls = tf.argmax(y_true, dimension=1)
# Create the model footprint
layer_conv1, weights_conv1 = new_conv_layer(input=x_image,
num_input_channels=num_channels,
filter_size=filter_size1,
num_filters=num_filters1,
use_pooling=True)
layer_conv2, weights_conv2 = new_conv_layer(input=layer_conv1,
num_input_channels=num_filters1,
filter_size=filter_size2,
num_filters=num_filters2,
use_pooling=True)
layer_flat, num_features = flatten_layer(layer_conv2)
layer_fc1 = new_fc_layer(input=layer_flat,
num_inputs=num_features,
num_outputs=fc_size,
use_relu=True)
layer_fc2 = new_fc_layer(input=layer_fc1,
num_inputs=fc_size,
num_outputs=num_classes,
use_relu=False)
y_pred = tf.nn.softmax(layer_fc2)
y_pred_cls = tf.argmax(y_pred, dimension=1)
# Restore the model
saver = tf.train.Saver()
session = tf.Session()
saver.restore(session, model_path)
The code I followed to create visualized weights is from the following:
Source code
Can someone tell me is the training or network is too shallow?

Answer 1

This is a perfectly fine visualization of the feature maps (not the weights) produced by the first convolutional layer on the early stages of the training.
The first layers learn to extract simple features, the learning process is somehow slow and thus you first learn to "blur" the input images, but once the network starts to converge you'll see that the first layers will start extracting meaningful low-level features (edges and so on).
Just monitor the training process and let the network training a bit more.
If, instead, you got bad performance (always look at the validation accuracy) your feature maps will always look noisy and you should start tuning the hyperparameters (lowering the learning rate, regularize, ...) in order to extract meaningful features and thus get good results