TensorFlow: How to apply the same image distortion to multiple images

Question

Starting from the Tensorflow CNN example, I'm trying to modify the model to have multiple images as an input (so that the input has not just 3 input channels, but multiples of 3 by stacking images). To augment the input, I try to use random image operations, such as flipping, contrast and brightness provided in TensorFlow. My current solution to apply the same random distortion to all input images is to use a fixed seed value for these operations:

def distort_image(image):
  flipped_image = tf.image.random_flip_left_right(image, seed=42)
  contrast_image = tf.image.random_contrast(flipped_image, lower=0.2, upper=1.8, seed=43)
  brightness_image = tf.image.random_brightness(contrast_image, max_delta=0.2, seed=44)
  return brightness_image

This method is called multiple times for each image at graph construction time, so I thought for each image it will use the same random number sequence and consequently, it will result in have the same applied image operations for my image input sequence.

# ...

# distort images
distorted_prediction = distort_image(seq_record.prediction)
distorted_input = []
for i in xrange(INPUT_SEQ_LENGTH):
    distorted_input.append(distort_image(seq_record.input[i,:,:,:]))
stacked_distorted_input = tf.concat(2, distorted_input)

# Ensure that the random shuffling has good mixing properties.
min_queue_examples = int(num_examples_per_epoch *
                         MIN_FRACTION_EXAMPLES_IN_QUEUE)

# Generate a batch of sequences and prediction by building up a queue of examples.
return generate_sequence_batch(stacked_distorted_input, distorted_prediction, min_queue_examples, 
                               batch_size, shuffle=True)

In theory, this works fine. And after doing some test runs, this really seemed to solve my problem. But after a while, I found out that I'm having a race-condition, because I use the input pipeline of the CNN-example code with multiple threads (which is the suggested method in TensorFlow to improve performance and reduce memory consumption at runtime):

def generate_sequence_batch(sequence_in, prediction, min_queue_examples,
                        batch_size):
    num_preprocess_threads = 8 # <-- !!!
    sequence_batch, prediction_batch = tf.train.shuffle_batch(
        [sequence_in, prediction],
        batch_size=batch_size,
        num_threads=num_preprocess_threads,
        capacity=min_queue_examples + 3 * batch_size,
        min_after_dequeue=min_queue_examples)
return sequence_batch, prediction_batch

Because multiple threads create my examples, it is not guaranteed anymore that all image operations are performed in the right order (in sense of the right order of random operations).

Here I came to a point where I got completely stuck. Does anyone know how to solve this problem to apply the same image distortion to multiple images?

Some thoughts of mine:

• I thought about to do some synchronizations arround these image distortion methods, but I could find anything provided by TensorFlow
• I tried to generate to generate a random number for e.g. the random brightness delta using tf.random_uniform() by myself and use this value for tf.image.adjust_contrast(). But the result of the TensorFlow random generator is always a tensor, and I have not found a way to use this tensor as a parameter for tf.image.adjust_contrast() which expects a simple float32 for its contrast_factor parameter.
• A solution that would (partly) work would be to combine all images to a huge image using tf.concat(), apply random operations to change contrast and brightness, and split the image afterwards. But this would not work for random flipping, because this would (at least in my case) change the order of the images, and there is no way to detect whether tf.image.random_flip_left_right() has performed a flip or not, which would be required to fix the wrong order of images if necessary.

Answer 1

Here is what I came up with by looking at the code of random_flip_up_down and random_flip_left_right within tensorflow :

def image_distortions(image, distortions):
    distort_left_right_random = distortions[0]
    mirror = tf.less(tf.pack([1.0, distort_left_right_random, 1.0]), 0.5)
    image = tf.reverse(image, mirror)
    distort_up_down_random = distortions[1]
    mirror = tf.less(tf.pack([distort_up_down_random, 1.0, 1.0]), 0.5)
    image = tf.reverse(image, mirror)
    return image


distortions = tf.random_uniform([2], 0, 1.0, dtype=tf.float32)
image = image_distortions(image, distortions)
label = image_distortions(label, distortions)

Answer 2

I would do something like this using tf.case. It allows you to specify what to return if certain condition holds https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/case

import tensorflow as tf

def distort(image, x):
    # flip vertically, horizontally, both, or do nothing
    image = tf.case({
        tf.equal(x,0): lambda: tf.reverse(image,[0]),
        tf.equal(x,1): lambda: tf.reverse(image,[1]),
        tf.equal(x,2): lambda: tf.reverse(image,[0,1]),
    }, default=lambda: image, exclusive=True)

    return image

def random_distortion(image):
    x = tf.random_uniform([1], 0, 4, dtype=tf.int32)
    return distort(image, x[0])

To check if it works.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# create image
image = np.zeros((25,25))
image[:10,5:10] = 1.
# create subplots
fig, axes = plt.subplots(2,2)
for i in axes.flatten(): i.axis('off')

with tf.Session() as sess:
    for i in range(4):
        distorted_img = sess.run(distort(image, i))
        axes[i % 2][i // 2].imshow(distorted_img, cmap='gray')

    plt.show()