Automatic Convolutional Neural Network Selection for Image Classification Using Genetic Algorithms

Deep neural networks such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved several significant milestones in visual data analytics. Benefited from transfer learning, many researchers use pre-trained CNN models to accelerate the training process. However, there is still uncertainty about the deep learning models, structures, and applications. For instance, the diversity of the datasets may affect the performance of each pre-trained model. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed a new approach based on genetic algorithms to select or regenerate the best pre-trained CNN models for different visual datasets. A new genetic encoding model is presented which denotes different pre-trained models in our population. During the evolutionary process, the optimal genetic code that represents the best model is selected, or new competitive individuals are generated using the genetic operations. The experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework which outperforms several existing approaches in visual data classification.