R vs Python: Image Classification with Keras

Even though the libraries for R from Python, or Python from R code execution existed since years and despite of a recent announcement of Ursa Labs foundation by Wes McKinney who is aiming to join forces with RStudio foundation, Hadley Wickham in particularly, (find more here) to improve data scientists workflow and unify libraries to be used not only in Python, but in any programming language used by data scientists, some data professionals are still very strict on the language to be used for ANN models limiting their dev. As a continuation of my R vs. Python comparison, I decided to test performance of both languages in terms of time required to train a convolutional neural network based model for image recognition. As the starting point, I took the blog post by Dr. Shirin Glander on how easy it is to build a CNN model in R using Keras. It is a Python library for artificial neural network ML models which provides high level fronted to various deep learning frameworks with Tensorflow being the default one. Since Keras is written in Python, it may be a natural choice for your dev.