I’ve started Fast ai’s Intro to deep learning course last week. And I’m finding it great so far. I writing this to encourage who’s curious about deep learning to give FastAi’s course a try. You only need a a laptop and intermediate programming skills to get started. With just a laptop you can create some relatively sophisticated models.
After a few lessons I decided to create a simple image classifier that can take an image and classify it as a hotdog or not hotdog. So the end results should look something like this:
The first step to train a model is to get data. I used Bing’s search image api to find images to train my model. Using Bing I created a dataset of hotdogs, burgers and pies. I grouped them into two groups: hotdogs and not hotdogs.
First results
After training my model. I tried to upload a picture of a hotdog and it predicted it correctly:
Then I tried a Pizza, and it worked:
Then I threw a curveball at my classifier and uploaded a cat:
It thought the cat was a hotdog. And confidently thought it was a hotdog.
This illustrates a good point about Deep Learning: Predictions are probabilistic. The model has no real intuition about a hotdog like a human does.
I looked through the my data base and I found that there were a lot of dogs within the model. I sourced my images from Bing’s image search. Obviously a some dogs turned up in the search term “hotdog”. And cat looks similar to a dog so I guess my classifier thought it was a hotdog.
I’m going to rerun the classifier by moving the dog pictures out of the hotdog database and into the not hotdog classifier
It still thinks the cat is a hotdog but at least its less confident. Progress! I’m still just two lessons into the course as of November 2020 so I don’t know how to solve this problem completely. So I’m going to stop here.
I hope I showed you deep learning is within the reach of the average person and encourage you to pick it up! And if you are interested I definitely recommend you to look into fast ai’s free course.
Amith Reddy 