Calculating Standard Deviation of Images (Lesson 7)

So at around 1:06:30 of Lesson 7, Jeremy talks about providing the mean and standard deviation for each RGB channel for the set of images. He has pre-calculated these and recommends his students to calculate them for themselves.

Calculating the mean I found easy enough:

x = np.array([np.array(Image.open(f'{PATH}/train/' + fname)) for fname in files])
mean = [0,0,0]
for image in x:
    mean += np.mean(image, axis=(0, 1))
mean / len(x) / 255

However, when calculating the standard deviation, I’m struggling. I’m currently using this:

sd = []
for image in x:
    sd.append(np.std(image, axis=(0,1)))
np.array(sd).mean(axis=0) / 255

However that gives me values of [0.2022 , 0.19932, 0.20086], which are incorrect.

I’m pretty sure my problem is just in not properly understanding how the standard deviation is properly calculated. I have experimented with ddof=1, though that seems to make little difference.

Any advice or resources that could lead me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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@fortydegrees You should first stack all the values per channel together in a for loop (use append), and then calculate the np.std.

hi @draz,

i am still not able to figure out standard deviation calculation.
Here is what i have done:
PATH = “cifar/”

files = os.listdir(f’{PATH}train/’)

x = np.array([np.array(Image.open(f’{PATH}train/’ + fname)) for fname in files])

for image in x:
c = 0
r = image[:,c,c]
r_std = np.std®
c+=1
g = image[:,c,c]
g_std = np.std(g)
c+=1
b = image[:,c,c]
b_std = np.std(b)
std +=(np.array([r_std,g_std,b_std]))

Have calculated standard deviation for each channel for each image and summed them up. Does this make sense or am i doing something wrong?

You should first just stack all the values per channel (not the STDs per channel) and then calculate the STD over the stacked values per channel.

The batchnorm codes in lesson 7 dropped good hints on how to do this. Alternativelt, maybe try searching the forums for ‘standard deviation’.

Thanks a lot for prompt response. this works . such a silly mistake on my part. Should have thought of this.

std = []

PATH = “cifar/”

files = os.listdir(f’{PATH}train/’)

x = np.array([np.array(Image.open(f’{PATH}train/’ + fname)) for fname in files])

for image in x:
c = 0
r_std = image[:,:,c].flatten()
c+=1
g_std = image[:,:,c].flatten()
c+=1
b_std = image[:,:,c].flatten()
std.append(np.array([r_std,g_std,b_std]))

np_std = np.array(std)

r_channel = np_std[:,0].flatten()
g_channel = np_std[:,1].flatten()
b_channel = np_std[:,2].flatten()

r_norm = np.std(r_channel) / 255
g_norm = np.std(g_channel) / 255
b_norm = np.std(b_channel) / 255
imgs_std = np.array([r_norm,g_norm,b_norm])
print(imgs_std)

Thanks. I am actually on that lecture as of now.