Advanced Image Classification using Wavelets and Convolutional Neural Networks

Image classification is a vital technology many people in all arenas of human life utilize. It is pervasive in every facet of the social, economic, and corporate spheres of influence, worldwide. This need for more accurate, detail-oriented classification increases the need for modifications, adaptations, and innovations to Deep learning algorithms. This paper uses Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to classify handwritten digits in the MNIST database, and scenes in the CIFAR-10 database. Our proposed method preprocesses the data in the wavelet domain to attain greater accuracy and comparable efficiency to the spatial domain processing. By separating the image into different subbands, important feature learning occurs over varying low to high frequencies. The fusion of the learned low and high frequency features, and processing the combined feature mapping results in an increase in the detection accuracy. Comparing the proposed methods to spatial domain CNN and Stacked Denoising Autoencoder (SDA), experimental findings reveal a substantial increase in accuracy.