Recognizing military vehicles in social media images using deep learning

This paper presents a system that uses machine learning to recognize military vehicles in social media images. To do so, the system draws on recent advances in applying deep neural networks to computer vision tasks, while also making extensive use of openly available libraries, models and data. Training a vehicle recognition system over three classes, the paper reports on two experiments that use different architectures and strategies to overcome the challenges of working with limited training data: data augmentation and transfer learning. The results show that transfer learning outperforms data augmentation, achieving an average accuracy of 95.18% using 10-fold cross-validation, while also generalizing well on a separate testing set consisting of social media content.