Intelligent Deep Convolutional Neural Network Based Object Detection Model for Visually Challenged People

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer Vision (CV) advancements have led to many useful methodologies in recent years, particularly to help visually-challenged people. Object detection includes a variety of challenges, for example, handling multiple class images, images that get augmented when captured by a camera and so on. The test images include all these variants as well. These detection models alert them about their surroundings when they want to walk independently. This study compares four CNN-based pre-trained models: Residual Network (ResNet-50), Inception v3, Dense Convolutional Network (DenseNet-121), and SqueezeNet, predominantly used in image recognition applications. Based on the analysis performed on these test images, the study infers that Inception V3 outperformed other pre-trained models in terms of accuracy and speed. To further improve the performance of the Inception v3 model, the thermal exchange optimization (TEO) algorithm is applied to tune the hyperparameters (number of epochs, batch size, and learning rate) showing the novelty of the work. Better accuracy was achieved owing to the inclusion of an auxiliary classifier as a regularizer, hyperparameter optimizer, and factorization approach. Additionally, Inception V3 can handle images of different sizes. This makes Inception V3 the optimum model for assisting visually challenged people in real-world communication when integrated with Internet of Things (IoT)-based devices.