A preliminary study on deep transfer learning applied to image classification for small datasets

Abstract

A new transfer learning strategy is proposed for image classification in this work, based on an 8-layer convolutional neural network. The transfer learning process consists in a training phase of the neural network on a source dataset of images. Then, the last two layers are retrained using a different small target dataset of images. A preliminary study was conducted to train and test the transfer learning proposal on Malaria cell images for a binary classification problem. The methodology proposed has provided a 6.76% of improvement with respect to other three different strategies of training non-transfer learning models. The results achieved are quite promising and encourage to conduct further research in this field.