How does data normalization work in keras during prediction?

Question

I see that the imageDataGenerator allows me to specify different styles of data normalization, e.g. featurewise_center, samplewise_center, etc.

I see from the exampl

Answer 1

Yes - this is a really huge downside of Keras.ImageDataGenerator that you couldn't provide the standarization statistics on your own. But - there is an easy method on how to overcome this issue.

Assuming that you have a function normalize(x) which is normalizing an image batch (remember that generator is not providing a simple image but an array of images - a batch with shape (nr_of_examples_in_batch, image_dims ..) you could make your own generator with normalization by using:

def gen_with_norm(gen, normalize):
    for x, y in gen:
        yield normalize(x), y

Then you might simply use gen_with_norm(datagen.flow, normalize) instead of datagen.flow.

Moreover - you might recover the mean and std computed by a fit method by getting it from appropriate fields in datagen (e.g. datagen.mean and datagen.std).

Answer 2

I am using the datagen.fit function itself.

from keras.preprocessing.image import ImageDataGenerator

train_datagen = ImageDataGenerator(
    featurewise_center=True,
    featurewise_std_normalization=True)
train_datagen.fit(train_data)

test_datagen = ImageDataGenerator(  
    featurewise_center=True, 
    featurewise_std_normalization=True)
test_datagen.fit(train_data)

Ideally with this, test_datagen fitted on training dataset will learn the training datasets statistics. Then it will use these statistics to normalize testing data.

Answer 3

Use the standardize method of the generator for each element. Here is a complete example for CIFAR 10:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import keras
from keras.datasets import cifar10
from keras.preprocessing.image import ImageDataGenerator
from keras.models import Sequential
from keras.layers import Dense, Dropout, Flatten
from keras.layers import Conv2D, MaxPooling2D

# input image dimensions
img_rows, img_cols, img_channels = 32, 32, 3
num_classes = 10

batch_size = 32
epochs = 1

# The data, shuffled and split between train and test sets:
(x_train, y_train), (x_test, y_test) = cifar10.load_data()
print(x_train.shape[0], 'train samples')
print(x_test.shape[0], 'test samples')

# Convert class vectors to binary class matrices.
y_train = keras.utils.to_categorical(y_train, num_classes)
y_test = keras.utils.to_categorical(y_test, num_classes)

model = Sequential()

model.add(Conv2D(32, (3, 3), padding='same', activation='relu',
                 input_shape=x_train.shape[1:]))
model.add(Conv2D(32, (3, 3), activation='relu'))
model.add(MaxPooling2D(pool_size=(2, 2)))
model.add(Dropout(0.25))

model.add(Conv2D(64, (3, 3), padding='same', activation='relu'))
model.add(Conv2D(64, (3, 3), activation='relu'))
model.add(MaxPooling2D(pool_size=(2, 2)))
model.add(Dropout(0.25))

model.add(Flatten())
model.add(Dense(512, activation='relu'))
model.add(Dropout(0.5))
model.add(Dense(num_classes, activation='softmax'))

model.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='rmsprop',
              metrics=['accuracy'])

x_train = x_train.astype('float32')
x_test = x_test.astype('float32')
x_train /= 255
x_test /= 255

datagen = ImageDataGenerator(zca_whitening=True)

# Compute principal components required for ZCA
datagen.fit(x_train)

# Apply normalization (ZCA and others)
print(x_test.shape)
for i in range(len(x_test)):
    # this is what you are looking for
    x_test[i] = datagen.standardize(x_test[i])
print(x_test.shape)

# Fit the model on the batches generated by datagen.flow().
model.fit_generator(datagen.flow(x_train, y_train,
                                 batch_size=batch_size),
                    steps_per_epoch=x_train.shape[0] // batch_size,
                    epochs=epochs,
                    validation_data=(x_test, y_test))

Answer 4

I also had the same issue and I solved it using the same functionality, that the ImageDataGenerator used:

# Load Cifar-10 dataset
(trainX, trainY), (testX, testY) = cifar10.load_data()
generator = ImageDataGenerator(featurewise_center=True, 
                               featurewise_std_normalization=True)

# Calculate statistics on train dataset
generator.fit(trainX)
# Apply featurewise_center to test-data with statistics from train data
testX -= generator.mean
# Apply featurewise_std_normalization to test-data with statistics from train data
testX /= (generator.std + K.epsilon())

# Do your regular fitting
model.fit_generator(..., validation_data=(testX, testY), ...)

Note that this is only possible if you have a reasonable small dataset, like CIFAR-10. Otherwise the solution proposed by Marcin sounds good more reasonable.