Hi Jordan!

As of v0.5.7:

The current logits/argmax functionality is not flexible and can definitely be improved. Moreover, your example highlights a limitation that I overlooked completely. I also use the library to tile images, feed tiles to semantic segmentation network and merge back to full result, but in my case those images don't have channel dimension as it's always just one value per pixel, so I never used Merger's logits/argmax functionality and Tiler's channel_dimension at the same time...

Merger's add expects data with the same shape as tile_shape of the original Tiler. Similarly add_batch expects data of shape [batch, *tile_shape]. In your example batch variable is expected to be of shape (batch, 256, 256, 4).

If you specify logits for Merger, it would change the expected shape to [logits, *tile_shape] (or [batch, logits, *tile_shape]). If we specify logits in your example (e.g. merger = Merger(tiler, logits=6)), the expected data for add_batch would become (batch, 6, 256, 256, 4), which is also not something that you want to happen.

I will try to find the time to implement this soon and sorry for not supporting your usecase yet!

Hi,

Thanks for your response! While this might not be ideal, I was able to work around the channel_dimension constraints by having a second Tiler object with the N channels that are supposed to be the output of the network. The following is an example of the implementation. If you are okay with this, I can create a pull request with a similar example so other users I point to this library can leverage it.

Binary segmentation problem where output is N x 256 x 256 x 1

mode = 'constant'
batch_size = 512

tiler_image = Tiler(
    data_shape=image.shape,
    tile_shape=(256, 256, 4),
    channel_dimension=2,
    overlap=0.50,
    mode=mode,
)

tiler_mask = Tiler(
    data_shape=image.shape,
    tile_shape=(256, 256, 1),
    channel_dimension=2,
    overlap=0.50,
    mode=mode,
)

new_shape, padding = tiler_image.calculate_padding()
tiler_image.recalculate(data_shape=new_shape)
tiler_mask.recalculate(data_shape=new_shape)
padded_image = np.pad(image, padding, mode=mm, constant_values=1200)

merger = Merger(tiler=tiler_mask, window="overlap-tile")

for batch_id, batch in tiler_image(padded_image, batch_size=batch_size):
    batch = model.predict(batch)
    merger.add_batch(batch_id, batch_size, batch)

prediction = merger.merge(extra_padding=padding, dtype=image.dtype)
prediction = np.squeeze(np.where(prediction > 0.5, 1, 0).astype(np.int16))
print(prediction.shape, prediction.min(), prediction.max())

The only challenge I am trying to work around now is the presence of artifact effects at the boundary level of non-uniform images (e.g. an image of size 90538x9148x4 where the tile size is 256x256 with a batch size of 512). Is this something you have worked around with this library? I can open a new issue with this topic as well. An example is illustrated below, where those vertical lines are not expected at the left border of the image.

Nice workaround! Hopefully in the near future it will not be needed anymore!

Not sure how helpful these suggestions are, but:

• You can using another numpy padding mode (I personally see reflect provide the best results in my data)
• You can try using other merger windows, for example hamming, it should apply more weight to center of tile, instead of weighting all tile pixels equally
• If you have time, maybe you can try implementing something described in Vooban/Smoothly-Blend-Image-Patches
• If inference is cheap, you can try increasing overlap. In theory it should improve the results.

I'm curious to hear if you manage to fix this :)