A review of adaptable conventional image processing pipelines and deep learning on limited datasets

Abstract The objective of this paper is to study the impact of limited datasets on deep learning techniques and conventional methods in semantic image segmentation and to conduct a comparative analysis in order to determine the optimal scenario for utilizing both approaches. We introduce a synthetic data generator, which enables us to evaluate the impact of the number of training samples as well as the difficulty and diversity of the dataset. We show that deep learning methods excel when large datasets are available and conventional image processing approaches perform well when the datasets are small and diverse. Since transfer learning is a common approach to work around small datasets, we are specifically assessing its impact and found only marginal impact. Furthermore, we implement the conventional image processing pipeline to enable fast and easy application to new problems, making it easy to apply and test conventional methods alongside deep learning with minimal overhead.