Uses data augmentation and supervised transfer learning techniques to categorise individual features found in HD images. It is written in Ipython, using Jupyter Notebooks, to be run on Google Colaboratory.

Training convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to recognise images takes a lot of time and vast amounts of training data. This is less than ideal, as images typically need to be hand labelled.

Fortunately we can take a pre-trained model, and build in the extra internal representations that we need, to be able to make it distinguish the objects that we need. This is known as transfer learning. For this project two additional object categories were taught to the model.

This project uses the Mask R-CNN architecture with a model pre-trained on the MS COCO (Microsoft Common Objects in Context) dataset. Mask R-CNN can categorise multiple types and/or instances of objects in a single photograph, a feature known as image segmentation. The training data required for this consists of image files paired with XML files, which contain the bounding-box coordinates and category labels for entities found in the image.

Segmenting (labelling the objects in) HD images either uses large amounts of RAM, or requires us to reduce the image resolution, which is not ideal when working with images containing small features. A third way is explored in this code, by splitting the image (and any asssociated XML label file) into tiles, then reassembling them after analysis by the network.

Data augmentation is a range of techniques utilised to overcome the problems caused by a limited amount of training data. Images can be mirrored, rotated, skewed, or have noise added, to provide many additional almost-unique training examples that boost the CNN's ability to recognise the new objects.

Breaks the images and label data down into smaller image tiles, and a group of these are separated out for use as a test dataset. Running all the cells combines a series of flips and rotations to grow the original training data by a multiple of 12 (with more multiplications possible by adding extra rotation steps).

Organises and checks these training data, then feeds them into the Mask R-CNN / MSCOCO model. Different layers of the model can be selected to be updated through back-propagation. Finally the ability of the model to detect the new feature categories is assessed by comparing its predictions against previously-unseen labelled images.

Allows the use of this re-trained model to categorise objects found in previously-unseen HD photos. It utilises the same tiling procedure as before to break down images and send a batch of six tiles to the model, then returns an .xml file containing the categories and the absolute coordinates (with respect to the original HD photo) of any objects found.