Add training data to YOLO post-training

Question

(Cross-posting here from the data science stack exchange, as my question didn't get any replies. I hope it's okay!)

I've been playing around with YOLOv3 and obtaining some good results on the ~20 custom classes I trained. However, one or two classes look like they can use some additional training data (not a lot, say about 10% more data), which I can provide.

What is the most efficient way to train my model now? Do I need to start training from scratch? Can I just throw in my additional data (with the appropriate changes to the config files etc.) and run the training based on the weight matrix I already acquired, but for a small number of iterations? (1000?) Or is this more like a transfer learning problem now?

Thanks for all tips!

Answer 1

Assuming that you do have a dataset (images + labels/bounding boxes) in a format that's required by the training model, you can fine-tune your existing model. You can choose to unlock the final few layers or leave all the layers unlocked during the training process. When I had performed such an experiment with RetinaNet I chose to unlock final few conv layers and was able to achieve slightly higher accuracy.