Complete and hand in this completed worksheet (including its outputs and any supporting code outside of the worksheet) with your assignment submission. For more details see the assignments page on the course website.
We have seen that we can achieve reasonable performance on an image classification task by training a linear classifier on the pixels of the input image. In this exercise we will show that we can improve our classification performance by training linear classifiers not on raw pixels but on features that are computed from the raw pixels. All of your work for this exercise will be done in this notebook.
For each image we will compute a Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) as well as a color histogram using the hue channel in HSV color space. We form our final feature vector for each image by concatenating the HOG and color histogram feature vectors.
Roughly speaking, HOG should capture the texture of the image while ignoring color information, and the color histogram represents the color of the input image while ignoring texture. As a result, we expect that using both together ought to work better than using either alone. Verifying this assumption would be a good thing to try for your own interest.
The hog_feature and color_histogram_hsv functions both operate on a single image and return a feature vector for that image. The extract_features function takes a set of images and a list of feature functions and evaluates each feature function on each image, storing the results in a matrix where each column is the concatenation of all feature vectors for a single image.
from cs231n.features import *
num_color_bins = 10 # Number of bins in the color histogram
feature_fns = [hog_feature, lambda img: color_histogram_hsv(img, nbin=num_color_bins)]
X_train_feats = extract_features(X_train, feature_fns, verbose=True)
X_val_feats = extract_features(X_val, feature_fns)
X_test_feats = extract_features(X_test, feature_fns)
# Preprocessing: Subtract the mean feature
mean_feat = np.mean(X_train_feats, axis=0, keepdims=True)
X_train_feats -= mean_feat
X_val_feats -= mean_feat
X_test_feats -= mean_feat
# Preprocessing: Divide by standard deviation. This ensures that each feature
# has roughly the same scale.
std_feat = np.std(X_train_feats, axis=0, keepdims=True)
X_train_feats /= std_feat
X_val_feats /= std_feat
X_test_feats /= std_feat
# Preprocessing: Add a bias dimension
X_train_feats = np.hstack([X_train_feats, np.ones((X_train_feats.shape[0], 1))])
X_val_feats = np.hstack([X_val_feats, np.ones((X_val_feats.shape[0], 1))])
X_test_feats = np.hstack([X_test_feats, np.ones((X_test_feats.shape[0], 1))])
Using the multiclass SVM code developed earlier in the assignment, train SVMs on top of the features extracted above; this should achieve better results than training SVMs directly on top of raw pixels.