silverwhere / traffic-sign-classifier

I utilized deep neural networks and convolutional neural networks to classify traffic signs. I trained and validated a model so it can classify traffic sign images using the German Traffic Sign Dataset.

Project 3: Building a Traffic Sign Classifier (Recognition Program)

Overview

In this project, I utilized deep neural networks and convolutional neural networks to classify traffic signs. I trained and validated a model so it can classify traffic sign images using the German Traffic Sign Dataset. After the model was trained, I tested out the model on images of German traffic signs I found on the web. The rubric contains "Stand Out Suggestions" for enhancing the project beyond the minimum requirements, of which I believe I accomplished by augmenting the training data and challenging my classifier with "toxic" difficult to read road signs.

The goal of this project was to build a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in TensorFlow and Python

Overall my results were great!

Training Accuracy = 99.5%
Validation Accuracy = 95.8%
Test Set Accuracy = 93.1%

The Project

The goals / steps of this project are the following:

• Load the German Traffic Sign Dataset

• Explore, summarize and visualize the data set

A sample of the data set is included below. From the visualization of a histogram we can clearly see this is a large amount of training data, however there is very little validation data. The test data seems appropriate enough to test our classifier on.

From the visualization of a histogram we can clearly see this is a large amount of training data, however there is very little validation data. The test data seems appropriate enough to test our classifier on.

The histogram above shows an overlay of each data set across each of the 43 different sign classes. Of additional note is that there are limited images available for individual classes, some with as little as 180 total images, which may make those images harder to classify accurately. I will want to use data augmentation to create more images overall for training.

Number of training examples = 34,799
Number of validation examples = 4,410
Number of testing examples = 12,630

To add more training images from the existing training data, I used a rotation data augmentation technique, whereby taking each image in the training data set and rotating it both 10 degrees from vertical to 350 degrees (-10 degrees) from vertical. This brought the new amount of training examples available to train against to 104,397.

• Design, train and test a model architecture

Prior to training the model, I normalized all the training, validation and test data. The image data should be normalized so that the data has mean zero and equal variance. For image data, (pixel - 127.5)/ 255 will take the pixel is a quick way to approximately normalize the data and can be used in this project. A well conditioned image allows the optimizer to be more efficient to find a solution.

Source: Udacity

Secondly, I converted all of the images to grayscale to help with image classification. As Pierre Sermanet and Yann LeCun mentioned in their paper, using color channels didn't seem to improve things a lot. Therefore, I will only use a single channel in my model, e.g. grayscale images instead of color RGB.

Third, I used histogram equalization. This method usually increases the global contrast of many images, especially when the usable data of the image is represented by close contrast values. Through this adjustment, the intensities can be better distributed on the histogram. This allows for areas of lower local contrast to gain a higher contrast. Histogram equalization accomplishes this by effectively spreading out the most frequent intensity values.

My model architecture (Deep Learning Model) Based on LeNet Architecture, with the exception of adding max pooling layers, ReLU's sub sampling methods and dropout regularizations.

Source: Yan LeCun

Parameters

To calculate the number of neurons in each layer on our CNN:

Given:

• Input Layer has a Width W and a Height H
• Convolution Layer has a Filter size F
• Stride of S
• Padding P Note no padding was neccessary for image library (images are 32x32x3)
• Number of Filters K

Formula:

• Width of Next Layer W_out = [(W - F + 2P) / S] + 1
• Height of Next Layer H_out = [(H - F + 2P) / S] + 1
• Output Depth D_out = K Number of filters
• Output Volume V_out = W_out * H_out * D_out

With parameter sharing, each neuron in an output channel shares it's weights with every other neuron in that channel. So the number of parameters is equal to the number of neurons in the filter, plus a bias neuron, all multiplied by the number of channels in the output layer.

Remember with weight sharing we use the same filter for an entire depth slice!

If you have N inputs, & K outputs you have (N+1)K parameters to use.

• Use the model to make predictions on new images

Utilizing the model initially offered a great training accuracy, but a poor validation accuracy. The training log in the Traffic_Sign_Classifier.ipynb file will list the changes. But most notable were:

• data augmentation training images (rotated) preprocessing at this step

• shuffled training data

• normalization (changed normalization to -1 to 1 from 0 to 1)

• LeNet model architecture modification - original LeNet model plus added I a dropout before final 3rd fully connected layer. The course mentioned an initial keep_prob: 0.7 for a dropout regularization, but from From Nitish Srivastava paper *"Dropout probability p independent of other units, where p can be chosen using a validation set or can simply be set at 0.5, which seems to be close to optimal for a wide range of networks and tasks." Therefore, I choose a keep_prob: 0.5 for training and validation.

• Training

To train the model I had to adjust several hyperparameters, most notibly EPOCHS, batch size, learning rate and optimizer.

EPOCHS tells TensorFlow how many times to run our training data through the network. In general the more epochs, the better our model will train, but also the longer training will take. I initially selected 10 EPOCHS, however, I noticed a high accuracy on the training set and a low accuracy on the validation set (78.3%), which implies overfitting. To increase accuracy I updated the number of EPOCHS to 50, which I noticed while training the accuracy appeared to level off on both the training set and validation data set after 47 EPOCHS, so I feel 50 EPOCHS is the a good estimate for my model.

BATCH_SIZE tells TensorFlow how many training images to run through the network at a time the larger the batch size, the faster our model will train, but our processor may have a memory limit on how large a batch it can run. I initally began with a BATCH_SIZE of 128 and remained with this size for the duration of testing, however, at the end of tuning all my other hyper-parameters, I decided to reduce the BATCH_SIZE to 100 to see if it would improve accuracy, which it did slightly, therefore keeping my selection at a BATCH_SIZE of 100.

Learning rate tells TensorFlow how quickly to update the network's weights; 0.001 is a good default value but can be experimented with, though I remained with my initial selection. Earlier on in tuning my model I decided to reduce the rate by half to 0.0005, however this took both longer to run the model and did not improve accuracy.

Optimizer - AdamOptimizer is a replacement optimization algorithm for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for training deep learning models. Adam combines the best properties of the AdaGrad and RMSProp algorithms to provide an optimization algorithm that can handle sparse gradients on noisy problems. I used our hyperparamter rate to tune the learning rate here.

Overall my results were great!

• Analyze the softmax probabilities of the new images

To test my model I downloaded (5) German road signs at random. I wanted to try really unique photos, so I tried to find road signs that are toxic as I read about in the following paper DARTS: Deceiving Autonomous Cars with Toxic Signs. I wanted to ensure the pictures had some graffiti, poor lighting, I also selected a few images that had a limited training data for that class.

The results were as expected, low, 40% accuracy. But I was still impressed with my accuracy, as I had choosen images such as 20 km/h and dangerous curve to the left which had only 180 training images each. Furthermore, the stop sign was half missing due to stickers being placed on the bottom half.

Below is a tensorflow 5 Softmax Probabilities For each image I found on the Web

Overall, I was able to accurately detect no entry and 20 km/h, I was surpised my classifier did not detect 70 km/h given it had both a high amount of training data and was the clearest image. I may need to recheck how the image converted to 32x32 pixels for use in LeNet.

• Visualize the Neural Network's State with Test Images (Optional)

This was an optional section, but I was curious to see how the feature maps looked after the first convolution. Below is an image of the no entry sign. I am very intriqued that it was able to pick up such details with limited number of pixels to accurately identify, I even have a hard time. But that is why the deep learning becomes so valuable.

• Remarks

This was a very interesting project. I spent a lot of time learning about the math that goes into a neural network, how each perceptron and how weights and bias' are updated. I can certainly see how different CNN's are more powerful and how deep learning as a field keeps increasing accuracy with fewer parameters. If I had more time, I would have liked to have gone back and changed the filter dimensions for different layer values in my model architecture, just to see how the results change. Overall, I am very happy with my results, espcially on such a large test set and a small set of 5 random images with lots of issues! I am really curious to see how we take in images that are of larger pixel size and classify them through a CNN.