Autoencoder: Denoise image using UpSampling2D and Conv2DTranspose Layers (Part: 3)

Ashrafur Rahman
4 min readMar 15, 2021
Photo by Bekky Bekks on Unsplash

For better understanding, this post is divided into three parts:

Part 1: GAN, Autoencoders: UpSampling2D and Conv2DTranspose

In this introductory part, I will cover fundamental terms and procedures used in this tutorial, enabling us to grasp the concept and comprehend the following sections of this tutorial more effectively.

Part 2: Denoising image with Upsampling Layer

This part will demonstrate how we can use upsampling method for denoising an image from their input. This part will be implemented using the notMNIST dataset.

Part 3: Denoising image with Transposed Convolution Layer

This part is similar to the previous part but I will use transposed convolution for denoising. This part will be covered using the infamous MNIST dataset.

Let’s start …

Part 3: Denoising image with Transposed Convolution Layer

In this part, we will use the handwritten image dataset name MNIST dataset. This is a well-known dataset and needs no introduction. So we will import the necessary libraries and load the dataset in our project.

Dataset and related libraries

As usual, we will use Keras with TensorFlow as a backend.

# importing libraries
import tensorflow as tf
import tensorflow.keras
from tensorflow.keras.models import Sequential
from tensorflow.keras.layers import Conv2D, Conv2DTranspose
from tensorflow.keras.constraints import max_norm
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
%matplotlib inline

TensorFlow Datasets provides a collection of ready-to-use datasets for use with TensorFlow. We will import the MNIST dataset using load_data() method.

# loading dataset(x_train, y_train), (x_test, y_test) = 
tf.keras.datasets.mnist.load_data()
# dataset information
print("Number of original training examples:", len(x_train))
print("Number of original test examples:", len(x_test))
print("Shape of a single image:", x_train[0].shape)

Output:

Downloading data from https://storage.googleapis.com/tensorflow/tf-keras-datasets/mnist.npz 
11493376/11490434 [==============================] - 0s 0us/step
Number of original training examples: 60000
Number of original test examples: 10000
Shape of a single image: (28, 28)

As we can see, our MNIST dataset consists of 60000 training images and 10000 test images. Each image has a 28x28 dimension and a single gray channel. We can scale images to [0.0,1.0] range for better handling in our model.

# scale the images from [0,255] to the [0.0,1.0] range
x_train, x_test = x_train[..., np.newaxis]/255.0,
x_test[..., np.newaxis]/255.0

Now we will define some variables for our model.

img_width, img_height = 28, 28
input_shape = (img_width, img_height, 1)
batch_size = 120
no_epochs = 50
max_norm_value = 2.0
validation_splits = 0.2
noise_factor = 0.5

Exploring Dataset

Now we will visualize some random dataset samples.

# some random images for visualization
for i in range(6):
digits = [[x_train[idx], y_train[idx]] for idx in
np.random.randint(len(x_train), size=10)]
plt.figure(figsize=(len(digits), 1))
for i, data in enumerate(digits):
plt.subplot(1, len(digits), i+1)
plt.imshow(data[0].reshape(28,28))
plt.title(data[1])
plt.xticks([])
plt.yticks([])
plt.show()

Output:

random samples from dataset

Generating Noisy Images

As we have generated noisy images in our previous part, we will generate noisy image using noise_factor = 0.5.

# create noisy image from dataset
noise_train = x_train + noise_factor *
np.random.normal(0,1,x_train.shape)
noise_test = x_test + noise_factor *
np.random.normal(0, 1, x_test.shape)

We can check the noisy images against the original images:

fig, ax = plt.subplots(1,15)
fig.set_size_inches(20, 4)
for i in range(15):
curr_img = np.reshape(x_train[i], (28,28))
ax[i].imshow(curr_img)
ax[i].set_xticks([])
ax[i].set_yticks([])
plt.show()
fig, ax = plt.subplots(1,15)
fig.set_size_inches(20, 4)
for i in range(15):
curr_img = np.reshape(noise_train[i], (28,28))
ax[i].imshow(curr_img)
ax[i].set_xticks([])
ax[i].set_yticks([])
plt.show()

Output:

Original image vs Noisy image

Defining Model

Our model consists of several Conv2D and two Conv2DTranspose layers. As an output, we will add one Conv2D layer. Layer parameters are self-explanatory and easily understandable.

# model layers for autoencodermodel = Sequential()
model.add(Conv2D(64, kernel_size=(3,3),
kernel_constraint=max_norm(max_norm_value),
activation = 'relu',
kernel_initializer= 'he_uniform',
input_shape = input_shape))
model.add(Conv2D(32, kernel_size=(3,3),
kernel_constraint=max_norm(max_norm_value),
activation='relu',
kernel_initializer='he_uniform'))
model.add(Conv2DTranspose(32,
kernel_size=(3,3),
kernel_constraint=max_norm(max_norm_value),
activation='relu',
kernel_initializer='he_uniform'))
model.add(Conv2DTranspose(64, kernel_size=(3,3),
kernel_constraint= max_norm(max_norm_value),
activation='relu',
kernel_initializer= 'he_uniform'))
model.add(Conv2D(1, kernel_size=(3,3),
kernel_constraint=max_norm(max_norm_value),
activation='sigmoid',
padding = 'same'))
model.summary()

Output:

Model: "sequential" _________________________________________________________________ Layer (type)                 Output Shape              Param #    ================================================================= conv2d (Conv2D)              (None, 26, 26, 64)        640        _________________________________________________________________ conv2d_1 (Conv2D)            (None, 24, 24, 32)        18464      _________________________________________________________________ conv2d_transpose (Conv2DTran (None, 26, 26, 32)        9248       _________________________________________________________________ conv2d_transpose_1 (Conv2DTr (None, 28, 28, 64)        18496      _________________________________________________________________ conv2d_2 (Conv2D)            (None, 28, 28, 1)         577        ================================================================= Total params: 47,425 
Trainable params: 47,425
Non-trainable params: 0 _________________________________________________________________

We will use adam as an optimizer and binary_crossentropyas a loss function. We will use 50 epochs for this training.

# model compilation & fitting
model.compile(optimizer=’adam’, loss = ‘binary_crossentropy’)
model.fit(noise_train, x_train, validation_split= validation_splits, epochs=no_epochs, batch_size=batch_size)

Prediction and Visualization

Now we can predict some test samples and visualize them.

# model prediction
fig_samples = noise_test[:10]
fig_original = x_test[:10]
fig_denoise = model.predict(fig_samples)

Let’s compare our predicted denoised images with original test images for better understanding.

for i in range(0, 6):
noisy_img = noise_test[i]
original_img = x_test[i]
denoise_img = fig_denoise[i]
fig, axes = plt.subplots(1, 3)
fig.set_size_inches(6, 2.8)
axes[0].imshow(noisy_img.reshape(28, 28))
axes[0].set_xticks([])
axes[0].set_yticks([])
axes[0].set_title('Noisy')
axes[1].imshow(original_img.reshape(28, 28))
axes[1].set_xticks([])
axes[1].set_yticks([])
axes[1].set_title('Original')

axes[2].imshow(denoise_img.reshape(28, 28))
axes[2].set_xticks([])
axes[2].set_yticks([])
axes[2].set_title('Denoised')
plt.show()

Output:

prediction comparison

As you can see, it is possible to get an impressive result using a simple implementation. So that’s the idea of an autoencoder and how we can use it for denoising images. In this part, I demonstrated how we can use Conv2DTranspose for this purpose. Hope this will be helpful for your future learning.

All code samples for this part can be found here: Colab Link

Happy coding!

--

--