Thai culture image classification with transfer learning

Abstract

Classifying images of Thai culture is important for a variety of applications, such as tourism, education, and cultural preservation. However, building a Machine learning model from scratch to classify Thai cultural images can be challenging due to the limited availability of annotated data. In this study, we investigate the use of transfer learning for the task of image classification on a dataset of Thai cultural images. We utilize three popular convolutional neural network models, namely MobileNet, EfficientNet, and residual network (ResNet) as baseline pre-trained models. Their performances were evaluated when they were trained from random initialization, used as a feature extractor, and fully fine-tuned. The results showed that all three models performed better in terms of accuracy and training time when they were used as a feature extractor, with EfficientNet achieving the highest accuracy of 95.87% while maintaining the training time of 24 ms/iteration. To better understand the reasoning behind the predictions made by the models, we deployed the gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) visualization technique to generate heatmaps that the models attend to when making predictions. Both our quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrated that transfer learning is an effective approach to image classification on Thai cultural images.