• The TensorFlow tutorials are written as Jupyter notebooks and run directly in Google Colab—a hosted notebook environment that requires no setup. Click the Run in Google Colab button.


  • Colab link - Open colab


  • Image captioning with visual attention - Given an image like the example , our goal is to generate a caption such as "a surfer riding on a wave".


  • this, you'll use an attention-based model, which enables us to see what parts of the image the model focuses on as it generates a caption.


  • The model architecture is similar to [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention] .


  • This notebook is an end-to-end example. When you run the notebook, it downloads the [MS-COCO] dataset, preprocesses and caches a subset of images using Inception V3, trains an encoder-decoder model, and generates captions on new images using the trained model.


  • In this example, you will train a model on a relatively small amount of data—the first 30,000 captions for about 20,000 images (because there are multiple captions per image in the dataset).


  • 
    import tensorflow as tf
    
    # You'll generate plots of attention in order to see which parts of an image
    # our model focuses on during captioning
    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
    
    # Scikit-learn includes many helpful utilities
    from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
    from sklearn.utils import shuffle
    
    import collections
    import random
    import re
    import numpy as np
    import os
    import time
    import json
    from glob import glob
    from PIL import Image
    import pickle
      
    
  • Download and prepare the MS-COCO dataset You will use the [MS-COCO dataset] to train our model.


  • The dataset contains over 82,000 images, each of which has at least 5 different caption annotations. The code below downloads and extracts the dataset automatically.


  • **Caution: large download ahead**. You'll use the training set, which is a 13GB file.


  • 
    # Download caption annotation files
    annotation_folder = '/annotations/'
    if not os.path.exists(os.path.abspath('.') + annotation_folder):
      annotation_zip = tf.keras.utils.get_file('captions.zip',
                                              cache_subdir=os.path.abspath('.'),
                                              origin = 'http://images.cocodataset.org/annotations/annotations_trainval2014.zip',
                                              extract = True)
      annotation_file = os.path.dirname(annotation_zip)+'/annotations/captions_train2014.json'
      os.remove(annotation_zip)
    
    # Download image files
    image_folder = '/train2014/'
    if not os.path.exists(os.path.abspath('.') + image_folder):
      image_zip = tf.keras.utils.get_file('train2014.zip',
                                          cache_subdir=os.path.abspath('.'),
                                          origin = 'http://images.cocodataset.org/zips/train2014.zip',
                                          extract = True)
      PATH = os.path.dirname(image_zip) + image_folder
      os.remove(image_zip)
    else:
      PATH = os.path.abspath('.') + image_folder
    
      
    
  • Optional: limit the size of the training set To speed up training for this tutorial, you'll use a subset of 30,000 captions and their corresponding images to train our model. Choosing to use more data would result in improved captioning quality.


  • 
    with open(annotation_file, 'r') as f:
        annotations = json.load(f)
    
    # Group all captions together having the same image ID.
    image_path_to_caption = collections.defaultdict(list)
    for val in annotations['annotations']:
      caption = f"<start> {val['caption']} <end>"
      image_path = PATH + 'COCO_train2014_' + '%012d.jpg' % (val['image_id'])
      image_path_to_caption[image_path].append(caption)
    
    image_paths = list(image_path_to_caption.keys())
    random.shuffle(image_paths)
    
    # Select the first 6000 image_paths from the shuffled set.
    # Approximately each image id has 5 captions associated with it, so that will 
    # lead to 30,000 examples.
    train_image_paths = image_paths[:6000]
    print(len(train_image_paths))
    
    train_captions = []
    img_name_vector = []
    
    for image_path in train_image_paths:
      caption_list = image_path_to_caption[image_path]
      train_captions.extend(caption_list)
      img_name_vector.extend([image_path] * len(caption_list))
    
    print(train_captions[0])
    Image.open(img_name_vector[0])
      
    
  • Preprocess the images using InceptionV3 Next, you will use InceptionV3 (which is pretrained on Imagenet) to classify each image. You will extract features from the last convolutional layer.


  • First, you will convert the images into InceptionV3's expected format by: * Resizing the image to 299px by 299px


  • * [Preprocess the images] using the [preprocess_input] method to normalize the image so that it contains pixels in the range of -1 to 1, which matches the format of the images used to train InceptionV3.


  • 
    def load_image(image_path):
        img = tf.io.read_file(image_path)
        img = tf.image.decode_jpeg(img, channels=3)
        img = tf.image.resize(img, (299, 299))
        img = tf.keras.applications.inception_v3.preprocess_input(img)
        return img, image_path
    
      
    
  • Initialize InceptionV3 and load the pretrained Imagenet weights Now you'll create a tf.keras model where the output layer is the last convolutional layer in the InceptionV3 architecture. The shape of the output of this layer is ```8x8x2048```.


  • You use the last convolutional layer because you are using attention in this example. You don't perform this initialization during training because it could become a bottleneck.


  • You forward each image through the network and store the resulting vector in a dictionary (image_name --> feature_vector).


  • After all the images are passed through the network, you pickle the dictionary and save it to disk.


  • 
    image_model = tf.keras.applications.InceptionV3(include_top=False,
                                                    weights='imagenet')
    new_input = image_model.input
    hidden_layer = image_model.layers[-1].output
    
    image_features_extract_model = tf.keras.Model(new_input, hidden_layer)
    
      
    
  • Caching the features extracted from InceptionV3 You will pre-process each image with InceptionV3 and cache the output to disk. Caching the output in RAM would be faster but also memory intensive, requiring 8 \* 8 \* 2048 floats per image. At the time of writing, this exceeds the memory limitations of Colab (currently 12GB of memory).


  • Performance could be improved with a more sophisticated caching strategy (for example, by sharding the images to reduce random access disk I/O), but that would require more code.


  • The caching will take about 10 minutes to run in Colab with a GPU. If you'd like to see a progress bar, you can:


  • install [tqdm] : `!pip install tqdm`


  • Import tqdm: `from tqdm import tqdm`


  • Change the following line: `for img, path in image_dataset:` to: `for img, path in tqdm(image_dataset):`


  • 
    # Get unique images
    encode_train = sorted(set(img_name_vector))
    
    # Feel free to change batch_size according to your system configuration
    image_dataset = tf.data.Dataset.from_tensor_slices(encode_train)
    image_dataset = image_dataset.map(
      load_image, num_parallel_calls=tf.data.experimental.AUTOTUNE).batch(16)
    
    for img, path in image_dataset:
      batch_features = image_features_extract_model(img)
      batch_features = tf.reshape(batch_features,
                                  (batch_features.shape[0], -1, batch_features.shape[3]))
    
      for bf, p in zip(batch_features, path):
        path_of_feature = p.numpy().decode("utf-8")
        np.save(path_of_feature, bf.numpy())
    
      
    
  • Preprocess and tokenize the captions * First, you'll tokenize the captions (for example, by splitting on spaces). This gives us a vocabulary of all of the unique words in the data (for example, "surfing", "football", and so on).


  • * Next, you'll limit the vocabulary size to the top 5,000 words (to save memory). You'll replace all other words with the token "UNK" (unknown).


  • * You then create word-to-index and index-to-word mappings.


  • * Finally, you pad all sequences to be the same length as the longest one.


  • 
    # Find the maximum length of any caption in our dataset
    def calc_max_length(tensor):
        return max(len(t) for t in tensor)
    
    # Choose the top 5000 words from the vocabulary
    top_k = 5000
    tokenizer = tf.keras.preprocessing.text.Tokenizer(num_words=top_k,
                                                      oov_token="<unk>",
                                                      filters='!"#$%&()*+.,-/:;=?@[\]^_`{|}~ ')
    tokenizer.fit_on_texts(train_captions)
    train_seqs = tokenizer.texts_to_sequences(train_captions)
    
    tokenizer.word_index['<pad>'] = 0
    tokenizer.index_word[0] = '<pad>'
    
    # Create the tokenized vectors
    train_seqs = tokenizer.texts_to_sequences(train_captions)
    
    # Pad each vector to the max_length of the captions
    # If you do not provide a max_length value, pad_sequences calculates it automatically
    cap_vector = tf.keras.preprocessing.sequence.pad_sequences(train_seqs, padding='post')
    
    # Calculates the max_length, which is used to store the attention weights
    max_length = calc_max_length(train_seqs)
    
    ## Split the data into training and testing
    
    img_to_cap_vector = collections.defaultdict(list)
    for img, cap in zip(img_name_vector, cap_vector):
      img_to_cap_vector[img].append(cap)
    
    # Create training and validation sets using an 80-20 split randomly.
    img_keys = list(img_to_cap_vector.keys())
    random.shuffle(img_keys)
    
    slice_index = int(len(img_keys)*0.8)
    img_name_train_keys, img_name_val_keys = img_keys[:slice_index], img_keys[slice_index:]
    
    img_name_train = []
    cap_train = []
    for imgt in img_name_train_keys:
      capt_len = len(img_to_cap_vector[imgt])
      img_name_train.extend([imgt] * capt_len)
      cap_train.extend(img_to_cap_vector[imgt])
    
    img_name_val = []
    cap_val = []
    for imgv in img_name_val_keys:
      capv_len = len(img_to_cap_vector[imgv])
      img_name_val.extend([imgv] * capv_len)
      cap_val.extend(img_to_cap_vector[imgv])
    
    len(img_name_train), len(cap_train), len(img_name_val), len(cap_val)
    
      
    
  • Create a tf.data dataset for training Our images and captions are ready! Next, let's create a tf.data dataset to use for training our model.


  • Feel free to change these parameters according to your system's configuration


  • 
    BATCH_SIZE = 64
    BUFFER_SIZE = 1000
    embedding_dim = 256
    units = 512
    vocab_size = top_k + 1
    num_steps = len(img_name_train) // BATCH_SIZE
    # Shape of the vector extracted from InceptionV3 is (64, 2048)
    # These two variables represent that vector shape
    features_shape = 2048
    attention_features_shape = 64
    
    # Load the numpy files
    def map_func(img_name, cap):
      img_tensor = np.load(img_name.decode('utf-8')+'.npy')
      return img_tensor, cap
    
    dataset = tf.data.Dataset.from_tensor_slices((img_name_train, cap_train))
    
    # Use map to load the numpy files in parallel
    dataset = dataset.map(lambda item1, item2: tf.numpy_function(
              map_func, [item1, item2], [tf.float32, tf.int32]),
              num_parallel_calls=tf.data.experimental.AUTOTUNE)
    
    # Shuffle and batch
    dataset = dataset.shuffle(BUFFER_SIZE).batch(BATCH_SIZE)
    dataset = dataset.prefetch(buffer_size=tf.data.experimental.AUTOTUNE)
    
      
    
  • Model Fun fact: the decoder below is identical to the one in the example for [Neural Machine Translation with Attention](../sequences/nmt_with_attention.ipynb).


  • The model architecture is inspired by the [Show, Attend and Tell] paper * In this example, you extract the features from the lower convolutional layer of InceptionV3 giving us a vector of shape (8, 8, 2048).


  • * You squash that to a shape of (64, 2048).


  • * This vector is then passed through the CNN Encoder (which consists of a single Fully connected layer).


  • * The RNN (here GRU) attends over the image to predict the next word.


  • 
    class BahdanauAttention(tf.keras.Model):
      def __init__(self, units):
        super(BahdanauAttention, self).__init__()
        self.W1 = tf.keras.layers.Dense(units)
        self.W2 = tf.keras.layers.Dense(units)
        self.V = tf.keras.layers.Dense(1)
    
      def call(self, features, hidden):
        # features(CNN_encoder output) shape == (batch_size, 64, embedding_dim)
    
        # hidden shape == (batch_size, hidden_size)
        # hidden_with_time_axis shape == (batch_size, 1, hidden_size)
        hidden_with_time_axis = tf.expand_dims(hidden, 1)
    
        # attention_hidden_layer shape == (batch_size, 64, units)
        attention_hidden_layer = (tf.nn.tanh(self.W1(features) +
                                             self.W2(hidden_with_time_axis)))
    
        # score shape == (batch_size, 64, 1)
        # This gives you an unnormalized score for each image feature.
        score = self.V(attention_hidden_layer)
    
        # attention_weights shape == (batch_size, 64, 1)
        attention_weights = tf.nn.softmax(score, axis=1)
    
        # context_vector shape after sum == (batch_size, hidden_size)
        context_vector = attention_weights * features
        context_vector = tf.reduce_sum(context_vector, axis=1)
    
        return context_vector, attention_weights
    
    class CNN_Encoder(tf.keras.Model):
        # Since you have already extracted the features and dumped it using pickle
        # This encoder passes those features through a Fully connected layer
        def __init__(self, embedding_dim):
            super(CNN_Encoder, self).__init__()
            # shape after fc == (batch_size, 64, embedding_dim)
            self.fc = tf.keras.layers.Dense(embedding_dim)
    
        def call(self, x):
            x = self.fc(x)
            x = tf.nn.relu(x)
            return x
    
    class RNN_Decoder(tf.keras.Model):
      def __init__(self, embedding_dim, units, vocab_size):
        super(RNN_Decoder, self).__init__()
        self.units = units
    
        self.embedding = tf.keras.layers.Embedding(vocab_size, embedding_dim)
        self.gru = tf.keras.layers.GRU(self.units,
                                       return_sequences=True,
                                       return_state=True,
                                       recurrent_initializer='glorot_uniform')
        self.fc1 = tf.keras.layers.Dense(self.units)
        self.fc2 = tf.keras.layers.Dense(vocab_size)
    
        self.attention = BahdanauAttention(self.units)
    
      def call(self, x, features, hidden):
        # defining attention as a separate model
        context_vector, attention_weights = self.attention(features, hidden)
    
        # x shape after passing through embedding == (batch_size, 1, embedding_dim)
        x = self.embedding(x)
    
        # x shape after concatenation == (batch_size, 1, embedding_dim + hidden_size)
        x = tf.concat([tf.expand_dims(context_vector, 1), x], axis=-1)
    
        # passing the concatenated vector to the GRU
        output, state = self.gru(x)
    
        # shape == (batch_size, max_length, hidden_size)
        x = self.fc1(output)
    
        # x shape == (batch_size * max_length, hidden_size)
        x = tf.reshape(x, (-1, x.shape[2]))
    
        # output shape == (batch_size * max_length, vocab)
        x = self.fc2(x)
    
        return x, state, attention_weights
    
      def reset_state(self, batch_size):
        return tf.zeros((batch_size, self.units))
    
    encoder = CNN_Encoder(embedding_dim)
    decoder = RNN_Decoder(embedding_dim, units, vocab_size)
    
    optimizer = tf.keras.optimizers.Adam()
    loss_object = tf.keras.losses.SparseCategoricalCrossentropy(
        from_logits=True, reduction='none')
    
    def loss_function(real, pred):
      mask = tf.math.logical_not(tf.math.equal(real, 0))
      loss_ = loss_object(real, pred)
    
      mask = tf.cast(mask, dtype=loss_.dtype)
      loss_ *= mask
    
      return tf.reduce_mean(loss_)
      
    
  • Checkpoint


  • 
    checkpoint_path = "./checkpoints/train"
    ckpt = tf.train.Checkpoint(encoder=encoder,
                               decoder=decoder,
                               optimizer = optimizer)
    ckpt_manager = tf.train.CheckpointManager(ckpt, checkpoint_path, max_to_keep=5)
    
    start_epoch = 0
    if ckpt_manager.latest_checkpoint:
      start_epoch = int(ckpt_manager.latest_checkpoint.split('-')[-1])
      # restoring the latest checkpoint in checkpoint_path
      ckpt.restore(ckpt_manager.latest_checkpoint)
    
      
    
  • Training * You extract the features stored in the respective `.npy` files and then pass those features through the encoder.


  • * The encoder output, hidden state(initialized to 0) and the decoder input (which is the start token) is passed to the decoder.


  • * The decoder returns the predictions and the decoder hidden state.


  • * The decoder hidden state is then passed back into the model and the predictions are used to calculate the loss.


  • * Use teacher forcing to decide the next input to the decoder.


  • * Teacher forcing is the technique where the target word is passed as the next input to the decoder.


  • * The final step is to calculate the gradients and apply it to the optimizer and backpropagate.


  • 
    # adding this in a separate cell because if you run the training cell
    # many times, the loss_plot array will be reset
    loss_plot = []
    
    @tf.function
    def train_step(img_tensor, target):
      loss = 0
    
      # initializing the hidden state for each batch
      # because the captions are not related from image to image
      hidden = decoder.reset_state(batch_size=target.shape[0])
    
      dec_input = tf.expand_dims([tokenizer.word_index['<start>']] * target.shape[0], 1)
    
      with tf.GradientTape() as tape:
          features = encoder(img_tensor)
    
          for i in range(1, target.shape[1]):
              # passing the features through the decoder
              predictions, hidden, _ = decoder(dec_input, features, hidden)
    
              loss += loss_function(target[:, i], predictions)
    
              # using teacher forcing
              dec_input = tf.expand_dims(target[:, i], 1)
    
      total_loss = (loss / int(target.shape[1]))
    
      trainable_variables = encoder.trainable_variables + decoder.trainable_variables
    
      gradients = tape.gradient(loss, trainable_variables)
    
      optimizer.apply_gradients(zip(gradients, trainable_variables))
    
      return loss, total_loss
    
    EPOCHS = 20
    
    for epoch in range(start_epoch, EPOCHS):
        start = time.time()
        total_loss = 0
    
        for (batch, (img_tensor, target)) in enumerate(dataset):
            batch_loss, t_loss = train_step(img_tensor, target)
            total_loss += t_loss
    
            if batch % 100 == 0:
                print ('Epoch {} Batch {} Loss {:.4f}'.format(
                  epoch + 1, batch, batch_loss.numpy() / int(target.shape[1])))
        # storing the epoch end loss value to plot later
        loss_plot.append(total_loss / num_steps)
    
        if epoch % 5 == 0:
          ckpt_manager.save()
    
        print ('Epoch {} Loss {:.6f}'.format(epoch + 1,
                                             total_loss/num_steps))
        print ('Time taken for 1 epoch {} sec\n'.format(time.time() - start))
    
    plt.plot(loss_plot)
    plt.xlabel('Epochs')
    plt.ylabel('Loss')
    plt.title('Loss Plot')
    plt.show()
    
      
    
  • Caption! * The evaluate function is similar to the training loop, except you don't use teacher forcing here. The input to the decoder at each time step is its previous predictions along with the hidden state and the encoder output.


  • * Stop predicting when the model predicts the end token.


  • * And store the attention weights for every time step.


  • 
    def evaluate(image):
        attention_plot = np.zeros((max_length, attention_features_shape))
    
        hidden = decoder.reset_state(batch_size=1)
    
        temp_input = tf.expand_dims(load_image(image)[0], 0)
        img_tensor_val = image_features_extract_model(temp_input)
        img_tensor_val = tf.reshape(img_tensor_val, (img_tensor_val.shape[0], -1, img_tensor_val.shape[3]))
    
        features = encoder(img_tensor_val)
    
        dec_input = tf.expand_dims([tokenizer.word_index['<start>']], 0)
        result = []
    
        for i in range(max_length):
            predictions, hidden, attention_weights = decoder(dec_input, features, hidden)
    
            attention_plot[i] = tf.reshape(attention_weights, (-1, )).numpy()
    
            predicted_id = tf.random.categorical(predictions, 1)[0][0].numpy()
            result.append(tokenizer.index_word[predicted_id])
    
            if tokenizer.index_word[predicted_id] == '<end>':
                return result, attention_plot
    
            dec_input = tf.expand_dims([predicted_id], 0)
    
        attention_plot = attention_plot[:len(result), :]
        return result, attention_plot
    
    def plot_attention(image, result, attention_plot):
        temp_image = np.array(Image.open(image))
    
        fig = plt.figure(figsize=(10, 10))
    
        len_result = len(result)
        for l in range(len_result):
            temp_att = np.resize(attention_plot[l], (8, 8))
            ax = fig.add_subplot(len_result//2, len_result//2, l+1)
            ax.set_title(result[l])
            img = ax.imshow(temp_image)
            ax.imshow(temp_att, cmap='gray', alpha=0.6, extent=img.get_extent())
    
        plt.tight_layout()
        plt.show()
    
    # captions on the validation set
    rid = np.random.randint(0, len(img_name_val))
    image = img_name_val[rid]
    real_caption = ' '.join([tokenizer.index_word[i] for i in cap_val[rid] if i not in [0]])
    result, attention_plot = evaluate(image)
    
    print ('Real Caption:', real_caption)
    print ('Prediction Caption:', ' '.join(result))
    plot_attention(image, result, attention_plot)
    
    
      
    
  • Try it on your own images For fun, below we've provided a method you can use to caption your own images with the model we've just trained.


  • Keep in mind, it was trained on a relatively small amount of data, and your images may be different from the training data (so be prepared for weird results!)


  • 
    image_url = 'https://tensorflow.org/images/surf.jpg'
    image_extension = image_url[-4:]
    image_path = tf.keras.utils.get_file('image'+image_extension,
                                         origin=image_url)
    
    result, attention_plot = evaluate(image_path)
    print ('Prediction Caption:', ' '.join(result))
    plot_attention(image_path, result, attention_plot)
    # opening the image
    Image.open(image_path)