subclassing_conv_layers.ipynb

Kernel: Python 3

Customizing the convolution operation of a Conv2D layer

Author: lukewood
Date created: 11/03/2021
Last modified: 11/03/2021
Description: This example shows how to implement custom convolution layers using the Conv.convolution_op() API.

Introduction

You may sometimes need to implement custom versions of convolution layers like Conv1D and Conv2D. Keras enables you do this without implementing the entire layer from scratch: you can reuse most of the base convolution layer and just customize the convolution op itself via the convolution_op() method.

This method was introduced in Keras 2.7. So before using the convolution_op() API, ensure that you are running Keras version 2.7.0 or greater.

A Simple StandardizedConv2D implementation

There are two ways to use the Conv.convolution_op() API. The first way is to override the convolution_op() method on a convolution layer subclass. Using this approach, we can quickly implement a StandardizedConv2D as shown below.

import os

os.environ["KERAS_BACKEND"] = "tensorflow"

import tensorflow as tf
import keras
from keras import layers
import numpy as np


class StandardizedConv2DWithOverride(layers.Conv2D):
    def convolution_op(self, inputs, kernel):
        mean, var = tf.nn.moments(kernel, axes=[0, 1, 2], keepdims=True)
        return tf.nn.conv2d(
            inputs,
            (kernel - mean) / tf.sqrt(var + 1e-10),
            padding="VALID",
            strides=list(self.strides),
            name=self.__class__.__name__,
        )

The other way to use the Conv.convolution_op() API is to directly call the convolution_op() method from the call() method of a convolution layer subclass. A comparable class implemented using this approach is shown below.

class StandardizedConv2DWithCall(layers.Conv2D):
    def call(self, inputs):
        mean, var = tf.nn.moments(self.kernel, axes=[0, 1, 2], keepdims=True)
        result = self.convolution_op(
            inputs, (self.kernel - mean) / tf.sqrt(var + 1e-10)
        )
        if self.use_bias:
            result = result + self.bias
        return result

Example Usage

Both of these layers work as drop-in replacements for Conv2D. The following demonstration performs classification on the MNIST dataset.

# Model / data parameters
num_classes = 10
input_shape = (28, 28, 1)

# the data, split between train and test sets
(x_train, y_train), (x_test, y_test) = keras.datasets.mnist.load_data()

# Scale images to the [0, 1] range
x_train = x_train.astype("float32") / 255
x_test = x_test.astype("float32") / 255
# Make sure images have shape (28, 28, 1)
x_train = np.expand_dims(x_train, -1)
x_test = np.expand_dims(x_test, -1)
print("x_train shape:", x_train.shape)
print(x_train.shape[0], "train samples")
print(x_test.shape[0], "test samples")

# convert class vectors to binary class matrices
y_train = keras.utils.to_categorical(y_train, num_classes)
y_test = keras.utils.to_categorical(y_test, num_classes)

model = keras.Sequential(
    [
        keras.layers.Input(shape=input_shape),
        StandardizedConv2DWithCall(32, kernel_size=(3, 3), activation="relu"),
        layers.MaxPooling2D(pool_size=(2, 2)),
        StandardizedConv2DWithOverride(64, kernel_size=(3, 3), activation="relu"),
        layers.MaxPooling2D(pool_size=(2, 2)),
        layers.Flatten(),
        layers.Dropout(0.5),
        layers.Dense(num_classes, activation="softmax"),
    ]
)

model.summary()

batch_size = 128
epochs = 5

model.compile(loss="categorical_crossentropy", optimizer="adam", metrics=["accuracy"])

model.fit(x_train, y_train, batch_size=batch_size, epochs=5, validation_split=0.1)

Conclusion

The Conv.convolution_op() API provides an easy and readable way to implement custom convolution layers. A StandardizedConvolution implementation using the API is quite terse, consisting of only four lines of code.