Here is a combined short summary on my travels to the city of Prague in the Czech Republic along with corresponding images created using Google’s DeepDreams.
What is this DeepDreams you speak of?
Basically, DeepDream is a deep neural network that was trained to recognize objects from millions of images. A deep neural network is composed of a stack of layers. Basically, these layers learn image filters that when applied to an image classify the image (e.g., is this an image of a cat or a dog?).
You give DeepDream an image and specify a layer in the neural network. The original image is then slightly perturbed to create a modified image that causes the specified layer in the neural network to be more activated.
Early layers in the neural network are sensitive to low level concepts like the edges and textures in the image. So if you specify an early layer, your image will be modified to have edges and textures that most activate the early selected layer.
Later (or deeper) layers in the neural network are activated when they see higher level concepts such as faces. So any areas in the original image that slightly look like a face, will be modified to look more like a face.
Okay, but now you might ask, but what about Prague? How was your trip? Did you like the city?
Yeah it was nice! Thanks for asking. Did you want to see some pictures? Here’s one of an old building.
Let’s try some deep dreaming on this. We’ll use the neural network known as VGG16 (it’s a famous neural network that performs very well on competitions). We’ll start by telling VGG16 (the neural network) to modify this image so that one of it’s middle layers becomes more activated. Specifically, we will activate layer
conv3_1 from VGG16 (if you don’t know what conv3_1 means, that’s okay – it’s just a technical detail specifying what layer to use). This gives us this:
Now if we activate a deeper layer,
conv5_2, we get this crazy looking image,