High-accuracy vehicle color recognition using hierarchical fine-tuning strategy for urban surveillance videos

Abstract

Vehicle color recognition is easily affected by subtle environmental changes. The existing recognition methods cannot achieve an accurate result. A high-accuracy vehicle color recognition method using a hierarchical fine-tuning strategy for urban surveillance videos is proposed. Different from the conventional convolutional neural networks-based methods, which usually obtain a single classification model, the proposed method combines pretraining and hierarchical fine-tunings to obtain different classification models that can adapt to the change of illumination conditions. First, the GoogLeNet is pretrained using the ILSVRC-2012 dataset to obtain the initial weight parameters of the network. During the first stage of fine-tuning, the whole vehicle color dataset is used to fine-tune the pretrained results to get the initial classification model. Then, an image quality assessment method is proposed to evaluate the illumination conditions of the image. The whole vehicle color dataset is divided into some subdatasets according to the evaluation results. The second stage of fine-tuning is performed on the initial classification model using each subdataset. Thus, the final classification models for the subdatasets are obtained. The experimental results on different databases demonstrate that the recognition accuracy of the proposed method can achieve superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods.