Create color histogram of an image using tensorflow

Question

Is there a neat way to compute a color histogram of an image? Maybe by abusing the internal code of tf.histogram_summary? From what I've seen, this code is not very modular and calls directly some C++ code.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I would use tf.unsorted_segment_sum, where the "segment IDs" are computed from the color values and the thing you sum is a tf.ones vector. Note that tf.unsorted_segment_sum is probably better thought of as "bucket sum". It implements dest[segment] += thing_to_sum -- exactly the operation you need for a histogram.

In slightly pseudocode (meaning I haven't run this):

binned_values = tf.reshape(tf.floor(img_r * (NUM_BINS-1)), [-1])
binned_values = tf.cast(binned_values, tf.int32)
ones = tf.ones_like(binned_values, dtype=tf.int32)
counts = tf.unsorted_segment_sum(ones, binned_values, NUM_BINS)

You could accomplish this in one pass instead of separating out the r, g, and b values with a split if you wanted to cleverly construct your "ones" to look like "100100..." for red, "010010" for green, etc., but I suspect it would be slower overall, and harder to read. I'd just do the split that you proposed above.