Hands-On Convolutional Neural Networks with TensorFlow

Storing data in TFRecords

Let's start by considering the example of training a network for image classification. In this case, our data will be a collection of images with an associated label. One way we might store our data is in a directory-like structure of folders. For each label, we will have a folder containing the images belonging to that label:

-Data 
- Person 
   -im1.png 
- Cat 
   -im2.png 
- Dog 
   -im3.png 

Although this might seem a simple way to store our data, it has some major drawbacks as soon as the dataset size becomes too big. One big disadvantage comes when we start loading it.

Opening a file is a time-consuming operation, and having to open many millions of files multiple times is going to add a large overhead to training time. On ...