Classifying vehicles with convolutional neural network and feature encoding

Abstract

Vehicle type recognition has many applications in video surveillance, urban traffic management and automatic driving. This paper presents a new vehicle type recognition method using feature encoding combined with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). This method uses the CNN to learn the properties of the high-level image features. It is able to largely compensate the information loss if we use feature encoding solely. By contrast, to achieve satisfactory classification results, feature encoding algorithms do not need a large number of training samples. Thus, it can help CNN reduce the number of training samples. Therefore, we propose a hybrid algorithm by integrating method on vehicle type recognition in comparison to CNN, feature encoding algorithms and other competitive methods.