Abstract To optimize fruit production, a portion of the flowers and fruitlets of apple trees must be removed early in the growing season. The proportion to be removed is determined by the bloom intensity, i.e., the number of flowers present in the orchard. Several automated computer vision systems have been proposed to estimate bloom intensity, but their overall performance is still far from satisfactory even in relatively controlled environments. With the goal of devising a technique for flower identification which is robust to clutter and to changes in illumination, this paper presents a method in which a pre-trained convolutional neural network is fine-tuned to become specially sensitive to flowers. Experimental results on a challenging dataset demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms three approaches that represent the state of the art in flower detection, with recall and precision rates higher than 90 . Moreover, a performance assessment on three additional datasets previously unseen by the network, which consist of different flower species and were acquired under different conditions, reveals that the proposed method highly surpasses baseline approaches in terms of generalization capability.
In addition, transfer learning approaches such as fine-tuning have been investigated. Earlier layers of a deep network tend to contain more generic information (low-level features), which are then combined by the latter layers into task specific objects of interest. Thus, a network that can recognize different objects present in a large dataset must contain a set of low-level descriptors robust enough to characterize a wide range of patterns. Under this premise, fine-tuning procedures typically aim at adjusting the higher-level part of a network pre-trained on a large generic dataset, rather than training the full network from scratch. This greatly reduces the need for task-specific data, since only a smaller set of parameters has to be refined for the particular application @cite_52 .
@cite_52
1929903369
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have seen tremendous success in large-scale generic object recognition. In comparison with generic object recognition, fine-grained image classification (FGIC) is much more challenging because (i) fine-grained labeled data is much more expensive to acquire (usually requiring domain expertise); (ii) there exists large intra-class and small inter-class variance. Most recent work exploiting deep CNN for image recognition with small training data adopts a simple strategy: pre-train a deep CNN on a large-scale external dataset (e.g., ImageNet) and fine-tune on the small-scale target data to fit the specific classification task. In this paper, beyond the fine-tuning strategy, we propose a systematic framework of learning a deep CNN that addresses the challenges from two new perspectives: (i) identifying easily annotated hyper-classes inherent in the fine-grained data and acquiring a large number of hyper-class-labeled images from readily available external sources (e.g., image search engines), and formulating the problem into multitask learning; (ii) a novel learning model by exploiting a regularization between the fine-grained recognition model and the hyper-class recognition model. We demonstrate the success of the proposed framework on two small-scale fine-grained datasets (Stanford Dogs and Stanford Cars) and on a large-scale car dataset that we collected.