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Deep transfer learning for military object recognition under small training set condition

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Abstract

Convolutional neural network is powerful for general object recognition. However, its excellent performance depends largely on huge training set. Facing task like military object recognition in which image samples for training are scarce, its performance will degrade sharply. To solve this problem, a deep transfer learning method is proposed in this paper. The main idea consists of two parts: transfer learning for prior knowledge embedding and mixed layer for better feature extraction. It has been proved that the ability of feature extraction learned in large dataset is helpful to related tasks and can be transferred to a new neural network. The transfer learning process is achieved by fixing the weights of some layers and then retraining the remained layers. The key problem for deep transfer learning is which part should be transferred and which part should be retrained to adapt the network to the new task. This problem is solved by extensive experiments, and it is found that retraining the last three layers and transferring prior to the other layers can reach the best performance. Besides, we used mixed layer scheme to make use of the current information. In each mixed layer, convolution filters in different scales are combined together, helping to adapt features in different scales. By employing these two methods, the proposed method exhibits a large improvement in military object recognition under small training set. Experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve a high recognition precision, superior to many other algorithms compared.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61773295, 61503288 and 61572076.

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Author notes

  1. Zhi Yang and Wei Yu contributed equally to the work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer Science and Technology, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430065, China

    Zhi Yang

  2. Hubei Province Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing and Real-time Industrial System, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430065, China

    Zhi Yang

  3. Electronic Information School, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China

    Wei Yu, Pengwei Liang, Hanqi Guo, Yong Ma & Jiayi Ma

  4. College of Information Engineering, Capital Normal University, Beijing, 100048, China

    Likun Xia

  5. China Academy of Electronics and Information Technology, Beijing, 100041, China

    Feng Zhang

Authors
  1. Zhi Yang
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  2. Wei Yu
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  4. Hanqi Guo
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  7. Yong Ma
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Correspondence to Jiayi Ma.

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Yang, Z., Yu, W., Liang, P. et al. Deep transfer learning for military object recognition under small training set condition. Neural Comput & Applic 31, 6469–6478 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-018-3468-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-018-3468-3

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