Neural network using both images and numerical inputs

Question

To classify images, we are using a neural network with a few convolutional layers followed by a few fully-connected layers.

The metadata has some numerical information that could help classifying the images. Is there an easy way to input the numerical metadata into the first fully-connected layer, together with the output of the convolutions? Is it possible to implement this using TensorFlow, or even better Keras?

Answer 1

You may process the numerical data in another branch and then merge the result with the CNN branch and then pass the merged tensor to a few final dense layers. Here is a general sketch of the solution:

# process image data using conv layers
inp_img = Input(shape=...)
# ...

# process numerical data
inp_num = Input(shape=...)
x = Dense(...)(inp_num)
out_num = Dense(...)(x)

# merge the result with a merge layer such as concatenation
merged = concatenate([out_conv, out_num])
# the rest of the network ...

out = Dense(num_classes, activation='softmax')(...)

# create the model
model = Model([inp_img, inp_num], out)

Surely, to build such a model you need to use Keras Functional API. Therefore, I highly recommend to read the official guide for this purpose.