Multi-Label Image Annotation Using Tensorlow Object Detection API

Multi-label image annotator trained on a subset of corel-5k dataset. I manually labeled the images using labelImg. For test images, a text file is generated annotating each image with the most significant objects present in that image.

Results

Folder Structure

• Image Files: Both training and validation data are in images folder
• Annotation XMLs: Manually annotated XML files are in annotations/xmls folder. annotations/train.txt contains the training image names and annotations/test.txt contains the validation image names. I wrote this script to map each label with an integer id. This mapping is written in annotations/label_map.pbtxt
• Inference: For testing purpose, images are kept in test_images folder. After the program finishes running, annotated images are generated in output/test_images folder.

Installation

First, with python and pip installed, install the scripts requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Then you must compile the Protobuf libraries:

protoc object_detection/protos/*.proto --python_out=.

Add models and models/slim to your PYTHONPATH:

export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:`pwd`:`pwd`/slim

Note: This must be run every time you open terminal, or added to your ~/.bashrc file.

Usage

1) Create the TensorFlow Records

Run the script:

python object_detection/create_tf_record.py

Once the script finishes running, you will end up with a train.record and a val.record file. This is what we will use to train the model.

2) Download a Base Model

Training an object detector from scratch can take days, even when using multiple GPUs! In order to speed up training, we’ll take an object detector trained on a different dataset, and reuse some of it’s parameters to initialize our new model.

I used faster_rcnn_resnet101_coco for the demo from model zoo.

Extract the files and move all the model.ckpt to our models home directory.

3) Train the Model

Run the following script to train the model:

python object_detection/train.py \
        --logtostderr \
        --train_dir=train \
        --pipeline_config_path=faster_rcnn_resnet101.config

4) Export the Inference Graph

When you model is ready depends on your training data, the more data, the more steps you’ll need. You can test your model every ~5k steps to make sure you’re on the right path.

You can find checkpoints for your model in train folder.

Move the model.ckpt files with the highest number to the root of the repo:

• model.ckpt-STEP_NUMBER.data-00000-of-00001
• model.ckpt-STEP_NUMBER.index
• model.ckpt-STEP_NUMBER.meta

In order to use the model, you first need to convert the checkpoint files (model.ckpt-STEP_NUMBER.*) into a frozen inference graph by running this command:

python object_detection/export_inference_graph.py \
        --input_type image_tensor \
        --pipeline_config_path faster_rcnn_resnet101.config \
        --trained_checkpoint_prefix model.ckpt-STEP_NUMBER \
        --output_directory output_inference_graph

You should see a new output_inference_graph directory with a frozen_inference_graph.pb file.

5) Test the Model

Just run the following command:

python object_detection/object_detection_runner.py

It will run your object detection model found at output_inference_graph/frozen_inference_graph.pb on all the images in the test_images directory and output the results in the output/test_images directory.

Useful Resources

I followed this excellent blog post on how to use Google Object Detection API with custom dataset.