A Framework to Create a Deep Learning Detector from a Small Dataset: A Case of Parawood Pith Estimation

A deep learning-based object detector has been successfully applied to all application areas. It has high immunity to variations in illumination and deviations among objects. One weakness of the detector is that it requires a huge, undefinable dataset for training the detector to avoid overtraining and make it deployable. This research proposes a framework to create a deep learning-based object detector with a limited-sized dataset. The framework is based on training the detector with the regions surrounding an object that typically contain various features over a more extensive area than the object itself. Our proposed algorithm further post-processes the detection results to identify the object. The framework is applied to the problem of wood pith approximation. The YOLO v3 framework was employed to create the detector with all default hyperparameters based on the transfer learning approach. A wood pith dataset with only 150 images is used to create the detector with a ratio between training to testing of 90:10. Several experiments were performed to compare the detection results from different approaches to preparing the regions surrounding a pith, i.e., all regions, only close neighbors, and only diagonal neighbors around a pith. The best experiment result shows that the framework outperforms the typical approach to create the detector with approximately twice the detection precision at a relative average error. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2023-07-01-017 Full Text: PDF