Class Activation Map methods implemented in Pytorch

pip install grad-cam

⭐ Comprehensive collection of Pixel Attribution methods for Computer Vision.

⭐ Tested on many Common CNN Networks and Vision Transformers.

⭐ Works with Classification, Object Detection, and Semantic Segmentation.

⭐ Includes smoothing methods to make the CAMs look nice.

⭐ High performance: full support for batches of images in all methods.

Method	What it does
GradCAM	Weight the 2D activations by the average gradient
GradCAM++	Like GradCAM but uses second order gradients
XGradCAM	Like GradCAM but scale the gradients by the normalized activations
AblationCAM	Zero out activations and measure how the output drops (this repository includes a fast batched implementation)
ScoreCAM	Perbutate the image by the scaled activations and measure how the output drops
EigenCAM	Takes the first principle component of the 2D Activations (no class discrimination, but seems to give great results)
EigenGradCAM	Like EigenCAM but with class discrimination: First principle component of Activations*Grad. Looks like GradCAM, but cleaner
LayerCAM	Spatially weight the activations by positive gradients. Works better especially in lower layers
FullGrad	Computes the gradients of the biases from all over the network, and then sums them

Visual Examples

What makes the network think the image label is 'pug, pug-dog'	What makes the network think the image label is 'tabby, tabby cat'	Combining Grad-CAM with Guided Backpropagation for the 'pug, pug-dog' class

Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation

Object Detection	Semantic Segmentation

Classification

Resnet50:

Category	Image	GradCAM	AblationCAM	ScoreCAM
Dog
Cat

Vision Transfomer (Deit Tiny):

Category	Image	GradCAM	AblationCAM	ScoreCAM
Dog
Cat

Swin Transfomer (Tiny window:7 patch:4 input-size:224):

Category	Image	GradCAM	AblationCAM	ScoreCAM
Dog
Cat

Network	Image	GradCAM	GradCAM++	Score-CAM	Ablation-CAM	Eigen-CAM
VGG16
Resnet50

---

Chosing the Target Layer

You need to choose the target layer to compute CAM for. Some common choices are:

• FasterRCNN: model.backbone
• Resnet18 and 50: model.layer4[-1]
• VGG and densenet161: model.features[-1]
• mnasnet1_0: model.layers[-1]
• ViT: model.blocks[-1].norm1
• SwinT: model.layers[-1].blocks[-1].norm1

---

Using from code as a library

from pytorch_grad_cam import GradCAM, ScoreCAM, GradCAMPlusPlus, AblationCAM, XGradCAM, EigenCAM, FullGrad
from pytorch_grad_cam.utils.model_targets import ClassifierOutputTarget
from pytorch_grad_cam.utils.image import show_cam_on_image
from torchvision.models import resnet50

model = resnet50(pretrained=True)
target_layers = [model.layer4[-1]]
input_tensor = # Create an input tensor image for your model..
# Note: input_tensor can be a batch tensor with several images!

# Construct the CAM object once, and then re-use it on many images:
cam = GradCAM(model=model, target_layers=target_layers, use_cuda=args.use_cuda)

# You can also use it within a with statement, to make sure it is freed,
# In case you need to re-create it inside an outer loop:
# with GradCAM(model=model, target_layers=target_layers, use_cuda=args.use_cuda) as cam:
#   ...

# We have to specify the target we want to generate
# the Class Activation Maps for.
# If targets is None, the highest scoring category
# will be used for every image in the batch.
# Here we use ClassifierOutputTarget, but you can define your own custom targets
# That are, for example, combinations of categories, or specific outputs in a non standard model.
targets = [e.g ClassifierOutputTarget(281)]

# You can also pass aug_smooth=True and eigen_smooth=True, to apply smoothing.
grayscale_cam = cam(input_tensor=input_tensor, targets=targets)

# In this example grayscale_cam has only one image in the batch:
grayscale_cam = grayscale_cam[0, :]
visualization = show_cam_on_image(rgb_img, grayscale_cam, use_rgb=True)

---

Advanced use cases and tutorials:

You can use this package for "custom" deep learning models, for example Object Detection or Semantic Segmentation.

You will have to define objects that you can then pass to the CAM algorithms:

1. A reshape_transform, that aggregates the layer outputs into 2D tensors that will be displayed.
2. Model Targets, that define what target do you want to compute the visualizations for, for example a specific category, or a list of bounding boxes.

Here you can find detailed examples of how to use this for Object detection, Semantic Segmentation, and Vision Transformers:

• Notebook tutorial: Class Activation Maps for Object Detection with Faster-RCNN

• Notebook tutorial: Class Activation Maps for Semantic Segmentation

• How it works with Vision/SwinT transformers

Contribution request for the community: more tutorials for custom use cases, like YOLO object detection, or image captioning.

---

Smoothing to get nice looking CAMs

To reduce noise in the CAMs, and make it fit better on the objects, two smoothing methods are supported:

• aug_smooth=True

  Test time augmentation: increases the run time by x6.

  Applies a combination of horizontal flips, and mutiplying the image by [1.0, 1.1, 0.9].

  This has the effect of better centering the CAM around the objects.

• eigen_smooth=True

  First principle component of activations*weights

  This has the effect of removing a lot of noise.

AblationCAM	aug smooth	eigen smooth	aug+eigen smooth

---

Running the example script:

Usage: python cam.py --image-path <path_to_image> --method <method>

To use with CUDA: python cam.py --image-path <path_to_image> --use-cuda

---

You can choose between:

GradCAM , ScoreCAM, GradCAMPlusPlus, AblationCAM, XGradCAM , LayerCAM, 'FullGrad' and EigenCAM.

Some methods like ScoreCAM and AblationCAM require a large number of forward passes, and have a batched implementation.

You can control the batch size with cam.batch_size =

---

Citation

If you use this for research, please cite. Here is an example BibTeX entry:

@misc{jacobgilpytorchcam,
  title={PyTorch library for CAM methods},
  author={Jacob Gildenblat and contributors},
  year={2021},
  publisher={GitHub},
  howpublished={\url{https://github.com/jacobgil/pytorch-grad-cam}},
}

---

References

https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02391
Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization Ramprasaath R. Selvaraju, Michael Cogswell, Abhishek Das, Ramakrishna Vedantam, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra

https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.11063
Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks Aditya Chattopadhyay, Anirban Sarkar, Prantik Howlader, Vineeth N Balasubramanian

https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01279
Score-CAM: Score-Weighted Visual Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks Haofan Wang, Zifan Wang, Mengnan Du, Fan Yang, Zijian Zhang, Sirui Ding, Piotr Mardziel, Xia Hu

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9093360/
Ablation-cam: Visual explanations for deep convolutional network via gradient-free localization. Saurabh Desai and Harish G Ramaswamy. In WACV, pages 972–980, 2020

https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.02312
Axiom-based Grad-CAM: Towards Accurate Visualization and Explanation of CNNs Ruigang Fu, Qingyong Hu, Xiaohu Dong, Yulan Guo, Yinghui Gao, Biao Li

https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.00299
Eigen-CAM: Class Activation Map using Principal Components Mohammed Bany Muhammad, Mohammed Yeasin

http://mftp.mmcheng.net/Papers/21TIP_LayerCAM.pdf
LayerCAM: Exploring Hierarchical Class Activation Maps for Localization Peng-Tao Jiang; Chang-Bin Zhang; Qibin Hou; Ming-Ming Cheng; Yunchao Wei

https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.00780
Full-Gradient Representation for Neural Network Visualization Suraj Srinivas, Francois Fleuret