VGG16 – Convolutional Network for Classification and Detection

VGG16 is a convolutional neural network model proposed by K. Simonyan and A. Zisserman from the University of Oxford in the paper “Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition”. The model achieves 92.7% top-5 test accuracy in ImageNet, which is a dataset of over 14 million images belonging to 1000 classes. It was one of the famous model submitted to ILSVRC-2014. It makes the improvement over AlexNet by replacing large kernel-sized filters (11 and 5 in the first and second convolutional layer, respectively) with multiple 3×3 kernel-sized filters one after another. VGG16 was trained for weeks and was using NVIDIA Titan Black GPU’s.

DataSet

ImageNet is a dataset of over 15 million labeled high-resolution images belonging to roughly 22,000 categories. The images were collected from the web and labeled by human labelers using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowd-sourcing tool. Starting in 2010, as part of the Pascal Visual Object Challenge, an annual competition called the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) has been held. ILSVRC uses a subset of ImageNet with roughly 1000 images in each of 1000 categories. At all, there are roughly 1.2 million training images, 50,000 validation images, and 150,000 testing images. ImageNet consists of variable-resolution images. Therefore, the images have been down-sampled to a fixed resolution of 256×256. Given a rectangular image, the image is rescaled and cropped out the central 256×256 patch from the resulting image.

The Architecture

The architecture depicted below is VGG16.

The input to cov1 layer is of fixed size 224 x 224 RGB image. The image is passed through a stack of convolutional (conv.) layers, where the filters were used with a very small receptive field: 3×3 (which is the smallest size to capture the notion of left/right, up/down, center). In one of the configurations, it also utilizes 1×1 convolution filters, which can be seen as a linear transformation of the input channels (followed by non-linearity). The convolution stride is fixed to 1 pixel; the spatial padding of conv. layer input is such that the spatial resolution is preserved after convolution, i.e. the padding is 1-pixel for 3×3 conv. layers. Spatial pooling is carried out by five max-pooling layers, which follow some of the conv.  layers (not all the conv. layers are followed by max-pooling). Max-pooling is performed over a 2×2 pixel window, with stride 2.

Three Fully-Connected (FC) layers follow a stack of convolutional layers (which has a different depth in different architectures): the first two have 4096 channels each, the third performs 1000-way ILSVRC classification and thus contains 1000 channels (one for each class). The final layer is the soft-max layer. The configuration of the fully connected layers is the same in all networks.

All hidden layers are equipped with the rectification (ReLU) non-linearity. It is also noted that none of the networks (except for one) contain Local Response Normalisation (LRN), such normalization does not improve the performance on the ILSVRC dataset, but leads to increased memory consumption and computation time.

Configurations

The ConvNet configurations are outlined in figure 2. The nets are referred to their names (A-E). All configurations follow the generic design present in architecture and differ only in the depth: from 11 weight layers in the network A (8 conv. and 3 FC layers) to 19 weight layers in the network E (16 conv. and 3 FC layers). The width of conv. layers (the number of channels) is rather small, starting from 64 in the first layer and then increasing by a factor of 2 after each max-pooling layer, until it reaches 512.

Use-Cases and Implementation

Unfortunately, there are two major drawbacks with VGGNet:

1. It is painfully slow to train.
2. The network architecture weights themselves are quite large (concerning disk/bandwidth).

Due to its depth and number of fully-connected nodes, VGG16 is over 533MB. This makes deploying VGG a tiresome task.VGG16 is used in many deep learning image classification problems; however, smaller network architectures are often more desirable (such as SqueezeNet, GoogLeNet, etc.). But it is a great building block for learning purpose as it is easy to implement.

[Pytorch]

[Tensorflow]

[Keras]

Result

VGG16 significantly outperforms the previous generation of models in the ILSVRC-2012 and ILSVRC-2013 competitions. The VGG16 result is also competing for the classification task winner (GoogLeNet with 6.7% error) and substantially outperforms the ILSVRC-2013 winning submission Clarifai, which achieved 11.2% with external training data and 11.7% without it. Concerning the single-net performance, VGG16 architecture achieves the best result (7.0% test error), outperforming a single GoogLeNet by 0.9%.

It was demonstrated that the representation depth is beneficial for the classification accuracy, and that state-of-the-art performance on the ImageNet challenge dataset can be achieved using a conventional ConvNet architecture with substantially increased depth.