Image Classification with TensorFlow

This article is an end-to-end example of training, testing and saving a machine learning model for image classification using the TensorFlow python package. TensorFlow is a machine learning (primarily deep learning) package developed and open-sourced by Google; when it was originally released TensorFlow was a relatively low-level package for experienced users, however in the last few years and especially since the release of TensorFlow 2.0 it is now aimed at a wider range of users. A few years ago I ran a PoC with one of our developers that looked at running TensorFlow models offline on one of our mobile applications. Whilst we found that it was possible we also encountered a few challenges that made the solution quite fiddly. Roll forward to 2020 and TensorFlow has improved a lot; the latest version has greater integration with the Keras APIs, it's being extended to cover more of the data processing pipeline and has also branched out to support for new languages, with the TensorFlow.js