The purpose of the project was to apply what we've learned on image recognition in a more realistic situation and explore different kinds of approches we can take and compare the results.

In regards, we chose the 'Aerial Cactus Identification' (https://www.kaggle.com/c/aerial-cactus-identification), where we were to identify if an image has a specific type of cactus from different aerial angles.

The dataset contains 17500 aerial images of a certain type of cactus. The image files were already unified in size, which made it more convenient in terms of image preprocessing. The training images were labelled with a binary value has_cactus = 1 or 0.

In order to explore different approaches and packages offered for image recognition, we made multiple submission to Kaggle Competition using different methods.

The approaches that we've taken are as follows:

Through tackling the same project with different approaches, we were able to compare the advantages and disadvantages of each of the approaches such as the total time required for running the model, different options we can set for each of the methods. This in conclusion, allowed us to better understand what approaches we should be taking for other neural network projects in the future according to the different project conditions and requirements.

For all of the different approaches made, the results were as follows:

The result from the image above is from submitting the keras model, which scored the highest submission AUC among the three models. Detailed results from each of the models can be found below.

We can see that models from scratch using Keras or PyTorch scored higher than transfer learning models by a small difference. We councluded that this is because of the nature of the project, which was relatively specific and thus the generic trained model did not perform as well.

Since the Keras and Tensorflow Model which was trained purely on the training data gave us the best test AUC, we chose to submit this model to the Kaggle competition. Our rank was 514 out of 1092 submissions.

We were constantly faced with the problem of the multiplicity of good models and not enough computational power to find the best model. We approached this problem as best as we could with random grid searches and learning from previous Kaggle kernels. However, maybe we could further improve our performance by :

• learning to build neural networks using Spark on clusters to run a wider grid search
• understand samples of our data better to set better ranges for our hyperparameters
• learning how to use multiple GPU for a more efficient data processing into the model