I am training a classifier to identify 24 hand signs of American Sign Language. I created a custom dataset by recording videos in different backgrounds for each of the signs and later converted the videos into images. Each sign has 3000 images, that were randomly selected to generate a training dataset with 2400 images/sign and validation dataset with the remaining 600 images/sign.
- Total number of images in entire dataset: 3000 * 24 = 72000
- Training dataset: 2400 * 24 = 57600
- Validation dataset: 600 * 24 = 14400
- Image dimension (Width x Height): 1280 x 720 pixels
The CNN architecture used for training
model = Sequential([
Conv2D(32, (3, 3), activation='relu', input_shape=(IMG_HEIGHT, IMG_WIDTH ,3)),
MaxPooling2D(pool_size=(2,2)),
Dropout(0.25),
Conv2D(32, (3, 3), activation='relu'),
MaxPooling2D(pool_size=(2,2)),
Dropout(0.25),
Conv2D(64, (3, 3), activation='relu'),
MaxPooling2D(pool_size=(2,2)),
Dropout(0.25),
Conv2D(64, (3, 3), activation='relu'),
MaxPooling2D(pool_size=(2,2)),
Dropout(0.25),
Flatten(),
Dense(128, activation='relu'),
Dropout(0.25),
Dense(NUM_CLASSES, activation='softmax')
])
Training parameters:
IMG_HEIGHT = 224
IMG_WIDTH = 224
BATCH_SIZE = 32
NUM_CLASSES = 24
train_datagen = ImageDataGenerator(rescale = 1./255,
width_shift_range=0.1,
height_shift_range=0.1,
zoom_range=0.1,
fill_mode='constant')
EPOCHS = 20
STEPS_PER_EPOCH = TRAIN_TOTAL // BATCH_SIZE
VALIDATION_STEPS = VALIDATION_TOTAL // BATCH_SIZE
callbacks_list = [
tf.keras.callbacks.EarlyStopping(monitor = 'accuracy',
min_delta = 0.005,
patience = 3),
tf.keras.callbacks.ModelCheckpoint(filepath = 'D:\\Models\\HSRS_ThesisDataset_5Mar_1330.h5',
monitor= 'val_loss',
save_best_only = True)
]
optimizer = 'adam'
The model accuracy and model loss graph is shown in the figure below:
The results obtained at the end of the training are
- Train acc: 0.8000121
- Val acc: 0.914441
I read this article explaining why the validation loss is lower than the training loss I want to know:
- Is it because of the smaller dataset and random shuffling of the images?
- Is there any way to improve the condition without changing the dataset?
- Will this have a very detrimental effect on the model performance in real test cases? If not, can I just focus on improving the training accuracy of the overall model?