Data Augmentation and Clustering for Vehicle Make/Model Classification

Vehicle shape information is very important in Intelligent Traffic Systems (ITS). In this paper we present a way to exploit a training data set of vehicles released in different years and captured under different perspectives. Also the efficacy of clustering to enhance the make/model classification is presented. Both steps led to improved classification results and a greater robustness. Deeper convolutional neural network based on ResNet architecture has been designed for the training of the vehicle make/model classification. The unequal class distribution of training data produces an a priori probability. Its elimination, obtained by removing of the bias and through hard normalization of the centroids in the classification layer, improves the classification results. A developed application has been used to test the vehicle re-identification on video data manually based on make/model and color classification. This work was partially funded under the grant.