Classification of Oxford Pets using Transfer Learning

Lab Assignment from AI for Beginners Curriculum.

Task

Imagine you need to develop and application for pet nursery to catalog all pets. One of the great features of such an application would be automatically discovering the breed from a photograph. In this assignment, we will use transfer learning to classify real-life pet images from Oxford-IIIT pets dataset.

The Dataset

We will use the original Oxford-IIIT pets dataset, which contains 35 different breeds of dogs and cats.

To download the dataset, use this code snippet:

!wget https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/data/pets/data/images.tar.gz
!tar xfz images.tar.gz
!rm images.tar.gz

Stating Notebook

Start the lab by opening OxfordPets.ipynb

Takeaway

Transfer learning and pre-trained networks allow us to solve real-world image classification problems relatively easily. However, pre-trained networks work well on images of similar kind, and if we start classifying very different images (eg. medical images), we are likely to get much worse results.