Why Pytorch officially use mean=[0.485, 0.456, 0.406] and std=[0.229, 0.224, 0.225] to normalize images?

Question

In this page (https://pytorch.org/vision/stable/models.html), it says that "All pre-trained models expect input images normalized in the same way, i.e. mini-batches of 3-channel RGB images of shape (3 x H x W), where H and W are expected to be at least 224. The images have to be loaded in to a range of [0, 1] and then normalized using mean = [0.485, 0.456, 0.406] and std = [0.229, 0.224, 0.225]".

Shouldn't the usual mean and std of normalization be [0.5, 0.5, 0.5] and [0.5, 0.5, 0.5]? Why is it setting such strange values?

Answer 1

Using the mean and std of Imagenet is a common practice. They are calculated based on millions of images. If you want to train from scratch on your own dataset, you can calculate the new mean and std. Otherwise, using the Imagenet pretrianed model with its own mean and std is recommended.