Vehicle Logo Recognition System Based on Convolutional Neural Networks With a Pretraining Strategy

Since a vehicle logo is the clearest indicator of a vehicle manufacturer, most vehicle manufacturer recognition (VMR) methods are based on vehicle logo recognition. Logo recognition can be still a challenge due to difficulties in precisely segmenting the vehicle logo in an image and the requirement for robustness against various imaging situations simultaneously. In this paper, a convolutional neural network (CNN) system has been proposed for VMR that removes the requirement for precise logo detection and segmentation. In addition, an efficient pretraining strategy has been introduced to reduce the high computational cost of kernel training in CNN-based systems to enable improved real-world applications. A data set containing 11 500 logo images belonging to 10 manufacturers, with 10 000 for training and 1500 for testing, is generated and employed to assess the suitability of the proposed system. An average accuracy of 99.07% is obtained, demonstrating the high classification potential and robustness against various poor imaging situations.