Vehicle Make Detection Using the Transfer Learning Approach

Abstract

Vehicle detection and classification is an important part of an intelligent transportation surveillance system. Although car detection is a trivial task for deep learning models, studies have shown that when vehicles are visible from different angles, more research is relevant for brand classification. Furthermore, each year, more than 30 new car models are released to the United States market alone, implying that the model needs to be updated with new classes, and the task becomes more complex over time. As a result, a transfer learning approach has been investigated that allows the retraining of a model with a small amount of data. This study proposes an efficient solution to develop an updatable local vehicle brand monitoring system. The proposed framework includes the dataset preparation, object detection, and a view-independent make classification model that has been tested using two efficient deep learning architectures, EfficientNetV2 and MobileNetV2. The model was trained on the dominant car brands in Lithuania and achieved 81.39 % accuracy in classifying 19 classes, using 400 to 500 images per class.