Early and Late Level Fusion of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Concept Recognition

Abstract

Visual concept recognition is an active research field in the last decade. Related to this attention, deep learning architectures are showing great promise in various computer vision domains including image classification, object detection, event detection and action recognition in videos. In this study, we investigate various aspects of convolutional neural networks for visual concept recognition. We analyze recent studies and different network architectures both in terms of running time and accuracy. In our proposed visual concept recognition system, we first discuss various important properties of popular convolutional network architecture under consideration. Then we describe our method for feature extraction at different levels of abstraction. We present extensive empirical information along with best practices for big data practitioners. Using these best practices we propose efficient fusion mechanisms both for single and multiple network models. We present state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets while keeping computational costs at low level. Our results show that these state-of-the-art results can be reached without using extensive data augmentation techniques.