Lightweight Neural Network Based Garbage Image Classification Using a Deep Mutual Learning.

With the construction and development of civilized cities, image based garbage classification has gradually become an important concern in computer vision community. During the algorithms for image classification, the strong ability of Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) in feature learning makes it the most successful approach at the moment. However, the parameters of CNNs model are very huge, and its training usually depends on a large amount of samples. In this article, we tackle the problem of lightweight neural network based garbage image classification, which aims to learn classifier with a small number of model parameters. Specifically, we utilize the MobileNetV2 for the backbone of feature extraction network and jointly train such two nets in a way of deep mutual learning. It realizes the information distillation between the teacher and the student. With this, we can significantly improve the learning ability of the MobileNetV2 based lightweight neural network. The experimental results on a self-assembled dataset show that our proposal effectively classifies the garbage and achieves a classification effect batter than the state of the arts in terms of testing accuracy, time and model size.