Face Recognition Using Backpropagation Neural Network? - c++

I'm very new in image processing and my first assignment is to make a working program which can recognize faces and their names.
Until now, I successfully make a project to detect, crop the detected image, make it to sobel and translate it to array of float.
But, I'm very confused how to implement the Backpropagation MLP to learn the image so it can recognize the correct name for the detected face.
It's a great honor for all experts in stackoverflow to give me some examples how to implement the Image array to be learned with the backpropagation.

It is standard machine learning algorithm. You have a number of arrays of floats (instances in ML or observations in statistics terms) and corresponding names (labels, class tags), one per array. This is enough for use in most ML algorithms. Specifically in ANN, elements of your array (i.e. features) are inputs of the network and labels (names) are its outputs.
If you are looking for theoretical description of backpropagation, take a look at Stanford's ml-class lectures (ANN section). If you need ready implementation, read this question.
You haven't specified what are elements of your arrays. If you use just pixels of original image, this should work, but not very well. If you need production level system (though still with the use of ANN), try to extract more high level features (e.g. Haar-like features, that OpenCV uses itself).

Have you tried writing your feature vectors to an arff file and to feed them to weka, just to see if your approach might work at all?
Weka has a lot of classifiers integrated, including MLP.
As I understood so far, I suspect the features and the classifier you have chosen not to work.
To your original question: Have you made any attempts to implement a neural network on your own? If so, where you got stuck? Note, that this is not the place to request a complete working implementation from the audience.
To provide a general answer on a general question:
Usually you have nodes in an MLP. Specifically input nodes, output nodes, and hidden nodes. These nodes are strictly organized in layers. The input layer at the bottom, the output layer on the top, hidden layers in between. The nodes are connected in a simple feed-forward fashion (output connections are allowed to the next higher layer only).
Then you go and connect each of your float to a single input node and feed the feature vectors to your network. For your backpropagation you need to supply an error signal that you specify for the output nodes. So if you have n names to distinguish, you may use n output nodes (i.e. one for each name). Make them for example return 1 in case of a match and 0 else. You could very well use one output node and let it return n different values for the names. Probably it would even be best to use n completely different perceptrons, i.e. one for each name, to avoid some side-effects (catastrophic interference).
Note, that the output of each node is a number, not a name. Therefore you need to use some sort of thresholds, to get a number-name relation.
Also note, that you need a lot of training data to train a large network (i.e. to obey the curse of dimensionality). It would be interesting to know the size of your float array.
Indeed, for a complex decision you may need a larger number of hidden nodes or even hidden layers.
Further note, that you may need to do a lot of evaluation (i.e. cross validation) to find the optimal configuration (number of layers, number of nodes per layer), or to find even any working configuration.
Good luck, any way!

Related

Neural network and image classification

I have built an experimental neural network - the idea being that it can look at a JPEG image and identify which parts of the image are musical notation.
To train the network I have used various images of pages cut into 100 x 100 boxes which can either be valued at 1.0 (ie contains notation) or 0.0 (does not contain notation).
On training the network, though, it seems to have fixed itself that it - more or less - delivers a result of 0.5 every time (giving a square error of 0.25). The sigmoid (logistic) function is used for activation.
The network has 10,000 input neurons (for each pixel of the 100 x 100 image), 2000 hidden neurons (each input is attached to both a 'row' and a 'column' hidden neuron).
There is one output neuron.
Would I get better results with two output neurons? (ie one which activates for 'is music' and one which activates for 'is not music').
(You can see the C++ source for this here: https://github.com/mcmenaminadrian/musonet - though at any given time what is in the public repo may not be exactly what I am using on the machine.)
FWIW - the actual problem was because of the sign error in the code as described in the comment - so the two layers were fighting one another and, as you might expect, converged towards the middle.
But ... I based my code on a book from the 1990s - the much cited "Practical Neural Network Recipes in C++". There is nothing wrong with the book as such (though the C++ reflects that time's coding style and there is no use of STL classes and so on), but it does also come from an era where neural nets were not as well understood/engineered as today and so the basic design was quite flawed.
I'm now thinking about how best to implement a many layered convolutional network - not something discussed in the book at all (indeed it dismisses the idea of many layered networks relying instead on the fact that a single hidden layer NN is a general approximator).
I got some interesting results with the single hidden layer NN, but it's not really all that useful for image processing.

How to normalize sequence of numbers?

I am working user behavior project. Based on user interaction I have got some data. There is nice sequence which smoothly increases and decreases over the time. But there are little discrepancies, which are very bad. Please refer to graph below:
You can also find data here:
2.0789 2.09604 2.11472 2.13414 2.15609 2.17776 2.2021 2.22722 2.25019 2.27304 2.29724 2.31991 2.34285 2.36569 2.38682 2.40634 2.42068 2.43947 2.45099 2.46564 2.48385 2.49747 2.49031 2.51458 2.5149 2.52632 2.54689 2.56077 2.57821 2.57877 2.59104 2.57625 2.55987 2.5694 2.56244 2.56599 2.54696 2.52479 2.50345 2.48306 2.50934 2.4512 2.43586 2.40664 2.38721 2.3816 2.36415 2.33408 2.31225 2.28801 2.26583 2.24054 2.2135 2.19678 2.16366 2.13945 2.11102 2.08389 2.05533 2.02899 2.00373 1.9752 1.94862 1.91982 1.89125 1.86307 1.83539 1.80641 1.77946 1.75333 1.72765 1.70417 1.68106 1.65971 1.64032 1.62386 1.6034 1.5829 1.56022 1.54167 1.53141 1.52329 1.51128 1.52125 1.51127 1.50753 1.51494 1.51777 1.55563 1.56948 1.57866 1.60095 1.61939 1.64399 1.67643 1.70784 1.74259 1.7815 1.81939 1.84942 1.87731
1.89895 1.91676 1.92987
I would want to smooth out this sequence. The technique should be able to eliminate numbers with characteristic of X and Y, i.e. error in mono-increasing or mono-decreasing.
If not eliminate, technique should be able to shift them so that series is not affected by errors.
What I have tried and failed:
I tried to test difference between values. In some special cases it works, but for sequence as presented in this the distance between numbers is not such that I can cut out errors
I tried applying a counter, which is some X, then only change is accepted otherwise point is mapped to previous point only. Here I have great trouble deciding on value of X, because this is based on user-interaction, I am not really controller of it. If user interaction is such that its plot would be a zigzag pattern, I am ending up with 'no user movement data detected at all' situation.
Please share the techniques that you are aware of.
PS: Data made available in this example is a particular case. There is no typical pattern in which numbers are going to occure, but we expect some range to be continuous with all the examples. Solution I am seeking is generic.
I do not know how much effort you want to involve in this problem but if you want theoretical guaranties,
topological persistence seems well adapted to your problem imho.
Basically with that method, you can filtrate local maximum/minimum by fixing a scale
and there are theoritical proofs that says that if you sampling is
close from your function, then you extracts correct number of maximums with persistence.
You can see these slides (mainly pages 7-9 to get the idea) to get an idea of the method.
Basically, if you take your points as a landscape and imagine a watershed starting from maximum height and decreasing, you have some picks.
Every pick has a time where it is born which is the time where it becomes emerged and a time where it dies which is when it merges with an higher pick. Now a persistence diagram pictures a point for every pick where its x/y coordinates are its time of birth/death (by assumption the first pick does not die and is not shown).
If a pick is a global maximal, then it will be further from the diagonal in the persistence diagram than a local maximum pick. To remove local maximums you have to remove picks close to the diagonal. There are fours local maximums in your example as you can see with the persistence diagram of your data (thanks for providing the data btw) and two global ones (the first pick is not pictured in a persistence diagram):
If you noise your data like that :
You will still get a very decent persistence diagram that will allow you to filter local maximum as you want :
Please ask if you want more details or references.
Since you can not decide on a cut off frequency, and not even on the filter you want to use, I would implement several, and let the user set the parameters.
The first thing that I thought of is running average, and you can see that there are so many things to set, to get different outputs.

Neural Network gives same output for different inputs, doesn't learn

I have a neural network written in standard C++11 which I believe follows the back-propagation algorithm correctly (based on this). If I output the error in each step of the algorithm, however, it seems to oscillate without dampening over time. I've tried removing momentum entirely and choosing a very small learning rate (0.02), but it still oscillates at roughly the same amplitude per network (with each network having a different amplitude within a certain range).
Further, all inputs result in the same output (a problem I found posted here before, although for a different language. The author also mentions that he never got it working.)
The code can be found here.
To summarize how I have implemented the network:
Neurons hold the current weights to the neurons ahead of them, previous changes to those weights, and the sum of all inputs.
Neurons can have their value (sum of all inputs) accessed, or can output the result of passing said value through a given activation function.
NeuronLayers act as Neuron containers and set up the actual connections to the next layer.
NeuronLayers can send the actual outputs to the next layer (instead of pulling from the previous).
FFNeuralNetworks act as containers for NeuronLayers and manage forward-propagation, error calculation, and back-propagation. They can also simply process inputs.
The input layer of an FFNeuralNetwork sends its weighted values (value * weight) to the next layer. Each neuron in each layer afterwards outputs the weighted result of the activation function unless it is a bias, or the layer is the output layer (biases output the weighted value, the output layer simply passes the sum through the activation function).
Have I made a fundamental mistake in the implementation (a misunderstanding of the theory), or is there some simple bug I haven't found yet? If it would be a bug, where might it be?
Why might the error oscillate by the amount it does (around +-(0.2 +- learning rate)) even with a very low learning rate? Why might all the outputs be the same, no matter the input?
I've gone over most of it so much that I might be skipping over something, but I think I may have a plain misunderstanding of the theory.
It turns out I was just staring at the FFNeuralNetwork parts too much and accidentally used the wrong input set to confirm the correctness of the network. It actually does work correctly with the right learning rate, momentum, and number of iterations.
Specifically, in main, I was using inputs instead of a smaller array in to test the outputs of the network.

machine learning in c++

I am working on vision project using ( c++ and opencv )
I need to classify 5 number of double , so Is there function in opencv to classify vector of double ?
and if not exist like this function , What is the easiest way to classify vector of double in c++ ?
I extracted 5 points from the edges of the human body, head and hands
and feet and I need to train a neural network in order to identify if
the object is a human being or not
For that purpose would be better to use a Viola-Jones classificator, I think. However, OpenCV provides Multi-Layer-Perceptron (MLP) which you can easily use for this.
You have to create a big (>1000) training set which contains five doubles for each item. Then you have to use each time 5% or 10% elements of that set to create a test set.
See Multi-Layer-Perceptron here for more information about theory and implementation.
However I warn you that with such classifier you probably won't get good results as 5 points are probably not sufficient and you may have many false positives.

Is it possible to see if two MP3 files are the same song by analyzing the files' bytes?

This is to be done in C++ or C....
I know we can read the MP3s' meta data, but that information can be changed by anyone, can't it?
So is there a way to analyze a file's contents and compare it against another file and determine if it is in fact the same song?
edit
Lots of interesting things coming out that I hadn't thought of. Not at all a good idea to attempt this.
It's possible, but very hard.
Even the same original recording may well be encoded differently by different MP3 encoders or the same encoder with different settings... leading to different results when the MP3 is then decoded. You'd need to work out an aural model to "understand" how big the differences are, and make a judgement.
Then there's the matter of different recordings. If I sing "Once in Royal David's City" and Aled Jones sings it, are those the same song? What if there are two different versions of a song where one has slightly modified lyrics? The key could be different, it could be in a different vocal range - all kinds of things.
How different can two songs be but still count as "the same song"? Once you've decided that, then there's the small matter of implementing it ;)
If I really had to do this, my first attempt would be to take a Fourier transform of both songs and compare the histograms. You can use FFTW (http://www.fftw.org/) to take the Fourier transform, and then compare the histograms by summing the squares of the differences at each frequency. If the resultant sum is greater than some threshold (which you must determine by experimentation) then the songs are deemed to be different, otherwise they are the same.
No. Not SO simple.
You can check they contain the same encoded data, BUT:
Could be a different bitrate
Could be the same song, just a 1/100ths of a second off
In both cases the bytes would not match.
Basically, if a solution looks too simple to be true, it often is.
If you mean "same song" in the iTunes sense of "same recording", it would be possible to compares two audio files, but not by byte-by-byte comparison of an encoded file since even for the same format there are variables such as data rate and compression that are selected at time of encoding.
Also each encoding of the same recording may include different lead-in/lead-out timings, different amplitude and equalisation, and may have come from differing original sources (vinyl, CD, original master etc.). So you need a comparison method that takes all these variables into account, and even then you will end up with a 'likelihood' of a match rather than a definitive match.
If you genuinely mean "same song", i.e. any recording by any artist of the same composition and lyrics, then you are unlikely to get a high statistical correlation in most cases since pitch, tempo, range, instrumental arrangement will be very different.
In the "same recording" scenario, relatively simple signal processing and statistical techniques could be applied, in the "same song" scenario, AI techniques would need to be deployed, and even then the results I suspect would be poor.
If you want to compare MP3 files that originated from the same MP3, but have tagged with metadata differently, it would be straight forward to just compare the actual audio data. Since it originated from the same MP3 encoding, you should be able to do a byte by byte comparison. You would have to compare all byte. It should be sufficient to sample just a few to get a unique key that would be statistically almost impossible to find in another song.
If the files have been produced by different encoders, you would have to extract some "fuzzy" feature keys from the data and compare those keys. In a hurry I would probably construct an algorithm like this:
Decode audio to pulse-code modulation (wave) in a standard bit rate.
Find a fixed number of feature starting points using some dynamic location algorithm. For example find top 10 highest wave peaks ordered from beginning of wave or simply spread evenly across the wave (it would be a good idea to fix the first and last position dynamically though, since different encodings might not start and end at exactly the same point). An improvement would be to select feature points at positions in the wave that are not likely to be too repetitive.
Extract a set of one-dimensional feature key scalars from the feature points. For example, for each feature normalize the following n-sample values and count the number of zero-crossings, peak to average ratio, mean zero-crossing distance, signal-energy. The goal is to extract robust features that are relatively unique, while still characteristic even if some noise and distortion is added to the signal. This can obviously be improved almost infinitely.
Compare the extracted feature keys of the two files using some accuracy measurement (f.eks. 9 out of 10 feature extractions must match at least 99% on 4 out of 5 of their extracted feature keys).
The benefit of a feature extraction approach is that you can build a database of features for all your mp3-files and for a single file ask the question: What other media files have exactly or almost exactly the same feature as this one. The feature lookup could be implemented very efficiently with R*-trees or similar, which could be used to give you a fast distance measurement between the n-dimensional feature sets.
The above technique is essentially a variant of what is used in image search algorithms such as SIFT, which is probably the base of such application as Photosynth and Google Goggles. In image searching you filter the image for good candidate points for relatively unique features (such as corners of shapes), then you normalize the area around that feature to get normalized color, intensity, scale and direction of features. Finally you extract the features and search an n-dimensional database of features of other images and verify that found features in other images are geometrically positioned in the same pattern as in your search image. The technique for searching audio would be the same, only simpler, since audio is one dimensional.
Use the open source EchoPrint library to create a signature of the two audio files, and compare them with each other.
The library is very easy to use, and has clear examples on how to create the signatures.
http://echoprint.me/
You can even query their database with the signature and find matching song metadata (such as title, artist, etc).
I think the Fast Fourier-Transform (FFT) approach hinted by jstanley is pretty good for most use cases; in particular, it works for verifying that the two are the same release/ same recording by the same artist/ same bitrate / audio quality.
To be more explicit, sox and spek (via command line and GUI, respectively) can do this pretty painlessly.
Spek is pretty foolproof -- just open the software and point it to the two audio files in question.
sox can generate spectograms (FFTs) from the command line line so:
sox "$file" -n spectrogram -o "$outfile".
The result from either are two images; if they look basically identical, then for almost all intents and purposes, the two songs will be equivalent.
For example, I wanted to test if these two files:
Soundtrack to an imaginary film mixtape 2011.mp3
DJRUM - Sountrack to an imaginary film mixtape 2011 (for mary-anne hobbs).mp3
were the same. diff reported a difference in the binary files (perhaps due to metadata differences or minor encoding differences), but a quick glance at their spectrograms resolved it: