How to visualize Caffe Net using GraphViz

The network architecture of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) can be heavily layered and complex. Viewing the network visually is a great way to get a sense of its architecture. Since the network is a graph, it is easy to visualize this using GraphViz.

Caffe requires its Net to be in the Google ProtoBuf format. It also provides a draw_net.py script that can be used to output the graph to all the formats supported by GraphViz.

• From the Caffe root directory, you can export a .prototxt model file as a graph to a PNG image file:

$ python/draw_net.py foo.prototxt foo.png

Possible output formats include PNG, PDF, DOT and others supported by GraphViz.

• By default, the net layers are drawn from left-to-right. I prefer to visualize a CNN in top-to-bottom fashion:

$ python/draw_net.py --rankdir TB foo.prototxt foo.png

• I prefer to interact with the graph visualization, which is a bit difficult with an image file. So, I prefer to export to DOT format file and play with it using XDot:

$ python/draw_net.py foo.prototxt foo.dot
$ xdot foo.dot

Tried with: Ubuntu 14.04