Utilizing fastai to classify images of various types of alcoholic beverages

Link to Medium post: https://towardsdatascience.com/classifying-images-of-alcoholic-beverages-with-fast-ai-34c4560b5543

Link to Full notebook: https://github.com/kennethleungty/Alcohol-Image-Classifier-fastai/blob/main/Alcohol_Image_Classifier_Full_Version.ipynb

I was interested to test out fastai to setup and run an image classificaton deep learning model. Since I am someone who enjoys whisky from time to time, I decided that running a CNN classifier on alcohol images would be a nice topic to work on. The code here is mostly adapted from what is already publicly provided by fastai (check it out at https://www.fast.ai/)

Highly recommend to run this notebook in Google Colab. This is because the notebook was setup and tested in Google Colab, and Colab also offers a free GPU for training the model (up to 12 hours).

I will be leveraging the Bing Search v7 API (with Azure Account) to retrieve images for the deep learning classification model. As I found this setup to be rather tedious, I have decided to share some details on how to set it up properly.

You will need a Bing Search API key in order to obtain image datasets for your classifier. In order to retrieve the API key, you will need to first setup a Free Trial account at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/free/cognitive-services/.

There is a 7-day trial free period for new users. If you already have an existing account, click on the Upgrade (Pay-As-You-Go) option (there is still a Free option to select). You will need to provide a credit card number for verification. You just need to make sure that you select the free option throughout.

More details can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/search-apis/bing-web-search/create-bing-search-service-resource

After you are logged in inside the Azure portal, use the search bar at the top and key in Bing Search v7.

You will first need to create a resource group

After the resource group is set up, you can Add the Bing Search resource by searching for Bing Search v7 after clicking the Add button. Fill in the relevant fields subsequently

Lastly, go to Keys and Endpoint to retrieve your API key

Details of the steps from data curation to the actual classification are documented in the Jupyter notebook, so please feel free to have a look: https://github.com/kennethleungty/Alcohol-Image-Classifier-fastai/blob/main/Alcohol_Image_Classifier_Full_Version.ipynb