Fine-Grained Classification of Product Images Based on Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

With the rapid development of the Internet of things and e-commerce, feature-based image retrieval and classification have become a serious challenge for shoppers searching websites for relevant product information. The last decade has witnessed great interest in research on content-based feature extraction techniques. Moreover, semantic attributes cannot fully express the rich image information. This paper designs and trains a deep convolutional neural network that the convolution kernel size and the order of network connection are based on the high efficiency of the filter capacity and coverage. To solve the problem of long training time and high resource share of deep convolutional neural network, this paper designed a shallow convolutional neural network to achieve the similar classification accuracy. The deep and shallow convolutional neural networks have data pre-processing, feature extraction and softmax classification. To evaluate the classification performance of the network, experiments were conducted using a public database Caltech256 and a homemade product image database containing 15 species of garment and 5 species of shoes on a total of 20,000 color images from shopping websites. Compared with the classification accuracy of combining content-based feature extraction techniques with traditional support vector machine techniques from 76.3% to 86.2%, the deep convolutional neural network obtains an impressive state-of-the-art classification accuracy of 92.1%, and the shallow convolutional neural network reached a classification accuracy of 90.6%. Moreover, the proposed convolutional neural networks can be integrated and implemented in other colour image database.