Hi Everyone -
I’m working on developing a Fully-Convolutional-Network for a segmentation problem using satellite imagery. I’ve mainly been playing around with variations of the Tiramisu architecture and am starting to look more at U-Net (due to problems mentioned below).
The Tiramisu paper uses only a few hundred images in their training set. The DSTL Kaggle competition had only 25 images in their training set. I have about 46,000.
With my Tiramisu inspired networks I get decent preliminary results on a small handful of images but sadly I get OOM errors with batch sizes above 8 or so depending on the details of the network. In the Tiramisu paper they are using a batch size of 3 and 5 - for a few hundred images this seems fine but I had expected to use a much larger batch size to allow me to train on tens of thousands of images.
My questions:
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How do these networks train so well on such a small amount of imagery? One thought I had was that each individual pixel acts as separate training data - so passing through a single image is similar to having,say, 256x256 images in a CNN. One worry I have is that they are working so well because there isn’t substantial variation in the images they are looking at.
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Are there tricks that I may be missing that would allow me to have a larger batch size without hitting the OOM error?
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Assuming no – I see a few ways forward - which do people recommend?
- By inspection (or randomness) pick a small few hundred image subset of the full 46,000 set, train the network and hope it generalizes well to the rest of the images
- Try and train 30,000 images (say) with a batch size of 6ish.
- Use smaller images - allowing me to increase the batch size but simultaneously multiplying the amount of images available
- Looking into different architectures that wouldn’t be so memory intensive. (Recommendations?)
Thoughts on any of those three points - or any general advice greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Brookie