Week 3 Image_segmentation_Unet Preprocess may have a bug

In the programming assignment notebook “Image_segmentation_Unet_v2”, in methods

def process_path(image_path, mask_path):
    img = tf.io.read_file(image_path)
    img = tf.image.decode_png(img, channels=3)
    img = tf.image.convert_image_dtype(img, tf.float32)

    mask = tf.io.read_file(mask_path)
    mask = tf.image.decode_png(mask, channels=3)
    mask = tf.math.reduce_max(mask, axis=-1, keepdims=True)
    return img, mask

def preprocess(image, mask):
    input_image = tf.image.resize(image, (96, 128), method='nearest')
    input_mask = tf.image.resize(mask, (96, 128), method='nearest')

    input_image = input_image / 255.

    return input_image, input_mask

I think this line may be a bug:

input_image = input_image / 255.

If you read doc for tf.image.convert_image_dtype(…), this method if used with dtype=tf.float32, will rescale values to [0, 1]. So it may not be needed again in “def preprocess”. I verify by reading back the dataset processed_image_ds and confirmed np.max(img) ~= 1/255. instead of expected value of 1.0. Unless somehow, UNet is done with 1/255^2 as normalization, i think this may be unintended.

In any case, i think the model may still train and perform well with this sort of rescaling. The only problem is if someone want to visualize directly the image coming out of dataset, and plt.imshow(…) will not render anything (total black?).

Hi kechan,

Thanks for reporting this bug! I will report this to people working at the backend.

Hi @kechan & @reinoudbosch, thank you for pointing this out. You were right. We have now removed the re-normalizing code line. You can see the change in the latest assignment version by refreshing your workspace.

Thanks,
Mubsi.