Welcome to our weekly FiftyOne tips and tricks blog where we give practical pointers for using FiftyOne on topics inspired by discussions in the open source community. This week we’ll cover
view stages.
Wait, What’s FiftyOne?
FiftyOne is an open source machine learning toolset that enables data science teams to improve the performance of their computer vision models by helping them curate high quality datasets, evaluate models, find mistakes, visualize embeddings, and get to production faster.
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Ok, let’s dive into this week’s tips and tricks!
A primer on view stages
In FiftyOne, a
ViewStage represents a stage of logic such as matching, filtering, or slicing, which can be used to determine the samples that appear in a dataset view. These stages can be chained together to produce flexible logical pipelines, enabling the programmatic isolation and evaluation of subsets of computer vision data. Every view stage is exposed via an associated method on Dataset and DatasetView instances.
Continue reading for some tips and tricks to help you master view stages in FiftyOne!
See what view stages have been applied
Many computer vision workflows involve chaining view stages together to create several tailored views of a dataset. If you ever lose track of what logical operations have been performed to generate a DatasetView, you can get a summary of this information by printing out the dataset view.
As an example, we can chain together three stages of filtering labels, matching, and converting to patches:
At the bottom of the print out, we can see the three view stages summarized in order.
Learn more about the
ToPatches view stage in the FiftyOne Docs.
Listing available view stages
If you know you want to perform logical operations on your dataset to generate a new view, but aren’t sure exactly how to do so, use the list_view_stages() method to refresh your memory on all of the possibilities.
You can then use the '?' character to print out a view stage’s intended usage as well as some examples.
For example, running dataset.concat? returns the following:
Add a stage to a view
While every stage is exposed via an associated method on datasets and dataset views, you can also create a stage on its own.
For example, instead of generating a view without predictions using the exclude_fields() method, we can create the corresponding ExcludeFields stage, and then apply this logic to the dataset using the add_stage() method.
If we want to apply the same logic to multiple datasets or dataset views, it can be easier and less error-prone to define the stage separately, rather than reproducing identical logic in multiple places.
Create a stage with MongoDB
If you feel more comfortable working with MongoDB’s query language, you can code up your desired logic in raw
MongoDB aggregation pipeline syntax and generate a view stage from this using the
Mongo view stage, or the associated
mongo() method for datasets and dataset views.
This is all possible because FiftyOne uses MongoDB to efficiently store and access datasets.
Check for conversions
Some of FiftyOne’s view stages, including ToFrames and ToPatches generate views which differ from the datasets or views to which they are applied not only in content, but also in structure. In the case of ToFrames, the resulting view consisting of images is generated from an initial dataset or view consisting of videos:
As another example, applying the SelectGroupSlices stage to a Grouped Dataset results in a view whose media type is not group.
When in question, it is always a good idea to validate the anticipated properties of your generated views by looking at the media_type and other attributes.
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