Animal Face Classification using Dual Deep Convolutional Neural Network

A practical animal face classification system that classifies animals in image and video data is considered as a pivotal topic in machine learning. In this research, we are proposing a novel method of fully connected dual Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN), which extracts and analyzes image features on a large scale. With the inclusion of the state of the art Batch Normalization layer and Exponential Linear Unit (ELU) layer, our proposed DCNN has gained the capability of analyzing a large amount of dataset as well as extracting more features than before. For this research, we have built our dataset containing ten thousand animal faces of ten animal classes and a dual DCNN. The significance of our network is that it has four sets of convolutional functions that work laterally with each other. We used a relatively small amount of batch size and a large number of iteration to mitigate overfitting during the training session. We have also used image augmentation to vary the shapes of the training images for the better learning process. The results demonstrate that, with an accuracy rate of 92.0%, the proposed DCNN outruns its counterparts while causing less computing costs.