2021 2nd International Conference on Computing and Data Science (CDS)
Image Classification with Artificial Intelligence:
Cats vs Dogs
Youngjun Lee
Bejing No.80 Highschool
Beijing, China
youngjunlee@163.com
2021 2nd International Conference on Computing and Data Science (CDS) | 978-1-6654-0428-0/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/CDS52072.2021.00081
Abstract— With the rise of the techniques including big
data and artificial intelligence, we now have a higher-level
technology in solving image classification problems, and
increase the accuracy of image classification by a remarkable
amount. To compare and analyze the classification
performance from different machine learning and deep
learning, this paper implemented support vector machine and
convolutional neural network to solve the classical Cats vs
Dogs problem, and compared how different parameters affect
CNN. The lessons are summarized and presented in this paper.
Keywords— Support Vector Machine, Convolutional Neural
Network, Artificial Intelligence, Image Classification
I. INTRODUCTION
Image classification problems are universal in our daily
life. For instance, in the task of garbage classification, if we
do not know which category the trash belongs to, we just
need to take a picture of it with our smartphone. The relevant
app in the phone will automatically identify the information
in the picture and classify its type. In the process of realizing
the image classification, computer programs can use
handcrafted characteristics of pictures, such as information in
the edge and the distribution of the color, and then separate
the different kinds of objects.
Before the rise of the smartphone and artificial
intelligence, people already had the idea of classifying
images and also built multiple tools to use. OpenCV [1],
born in 1998, for instance, is the most popular open source
tool in the computer vision area. It provides an interface for
different programming languages like Python, Matlab and
Java, and has been widely applied both in the academia and
industry areas. OpenCV not only provides the basic
manipulation such as drawing, saving and conversion of the
picture, but also provides the basic function of edge
extraction and image classification. With the rise of
smartphones, these basic function of the picture
manipulations gradually moves to smartphones from
computers, making people able to use these functions
anytime and anywhere. While the image classification tools
represented by OpenCV provide the function of
classification, all the realization of these functions are based
on the empirical parameter setting. As a result, it is difficult
to fit in the complex situation and increasing demand of big
data.
After the rise of the A.I. technology, researchers collect a
large amount of images and contribute many large-scale
open datasets [2-5]. With these datasets, researchers propose
978-1-6654-0428-0/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/CDS52072.2021.00081
Authorized licensed use limited to: ULAKBIM UASL - Sutcu Imam Universitesi. Downloaded on October 26,2022 at 12:34:06 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
many machine learning models and effective training
algorithms. Machine learning models can study suitable
parameters from data automatically, and there are less
manual operations [6, 7]. After the rise of the deep learning,
a wide variety of the model of the neural networks,
especially convolutional neural networks show an impressive
performance in the image classification problem [8-10].
In this paper, we take the classical Cat vs Dogs problem
as an example, implement and compare the SVM and
different structures of CNN models, based on a real-world
dataset.
The contributions of this paper are summarized as
follows:
(1) We validate that the deep learning models represented
by CNN outperform the shallow machine learning models
represented by SVM, in the problem of image classification;
(2) We give a comprehensive evaluation of the influence
of different parameters.
The finding of this paper are as follows:
(1) The data augmentation technique is helpful in
improving the deep learning model’s performance;
(2) In the choice of optimizers, Adam is better than both
SGD and RMSprop;
(3) In the choice of the convolution kernel, the size of 3 is
better than the size of 5;
(4) In the choice of the activation function, LeakyReLU
is better than ReLU.
II. RELATED WORK
A. Digital Image Processing [11]
Since the computer came into being, images can be
stored and processed by computers. For a single-color image,
we represent it to pixels with a value range from 0 to 255.
Image processing software tools including OpenCV can
process basic operations such as drawing, copying,
displaying, saving, etc. They also support the affine
transformations like translation and rotation. Afterwards,
blurred images can be recovered by the noise filter, and the
edge can be extracted by detecting changes of nearby pixels.
These are traditional pre-processing technology of
pictures. After these processing, researchers combine
machine learning models like SVM to classify images. The
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 appearing of deep learning techniques simplifies the process
largely.
B. Deep Learning [12]
a. Deep Neural Network
Deep learning is a subset concept of machine learning,
that usually refers to multi-layer neural networks. In recent
years, thanks to the appearance of big data sets and powerful
hardware devices, deep learning gradually becomes the main
method of processing high dimensional data like pictures,
text, sound signals, etc. Neural networks are mainly
consisted of the connection of artificial neurons. Each neuron
applies the weighted sum operation first, then obtain the
output of the current neuron by a nonlinear activation
function, as an input for the next neuron layer. When a
neuron network contains multiple layers as hidden layers, we
call it a deep neural network (DNN). While adding hidden
layers can highly increase the learning skill of neural
networks, it can also increase the risk of overfitting. As a
result, dropout and early stopping are proposed as effective
methods of alleviating the overfitting problem.
b. Convolutional Neural Network
Convolutional neural network (CNN) is a special type of
neural network, mainly used in two-dimensional image
processing or three-dimensional video processing. CNN can
extract effective feature representations from pictures by
applying basic operations of convolution and pooling, and
further conduct recognition tasks based on these
representations. By using groups of convolution kernels,
convolutional neural network can process multi-channel
input, like color pictures. Also, it can extract different
features as different output channels. In early ImageNet
image classification contest, AlexNet model defeated a large
number of feature extraction methods that based on
handcrafted features, proved the superiority of CNN for the
first time.
While CNN is powerful, it needs a large range of data to
learn useful features. As a result, for the situation that has no
enough data, one possible solution is using data
augmentation technology to increase the size of the training
set. Another way is using transfer learning technologies,
which directly leverage pre-trained weights from ImageNet
and then fine tune them.
III. DATASET DESCRIPTION
The dataset we used contains a total of 25,000 images of
cats and dogs, of which 12,500 are cats and 12,500 are dogs.
This is a balanced classification problem, because the
number of images for cats or dogs is the same. We use
accuracy as an evaluation metric of our evaluation model.
Accuracy is defined as the proportion of correctly classified
images to the total number of images.
This data set is collected from the Internet, so it is not
perfect. There may be inaccuracy or interference. For
example, the picture may be a person holding a cat, or there
may be occlusion. These situations pose greater challenges to
the classification model.
In the following parts, we divide the training set and test
set according to the ratio of 80%-20%. All models are trained
on the training set and compared on the remaining test set.
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IV. MODELS DESCRIPTIONE
After This section introduces the various models we use,
including machine learning models represented by SVM, and
deep learning models represented by CNN.
A. Support Vector Machine
Image classification methods based on support vector
machines are usually based on two steps, including feature
extraction and modeling classification. Since traditional
machine learning methods usually rely on the process of
manual feature extraction, different feature extraction
methods have a great impact on the classification effect of
the model.
In this paper, in the feature extraction step, we first
convert the input color image to HSV space, that is, express
each pixel as the Hue, Saturation, and Value. The reason for
this step is that the transformed coordinate system can more
effectively express the characteristics of the image. Then the
distribution of Hue, Saturation, and Value is counted by
histogram statistics, and the probability value is normalized
after quantization into 8 intervals. Each probability
distribution value is composed of 8 data. In other words,
each image has a vector containing 3 * 8 values as input for
modeling and classification.
In the process of modeling and classification, we use a
standard support vector machine model. Given the vector
value of each image, the main idea of this model is to find a
hyperplane, and then distinguish the two vector points of cats
and dogs. The basis for selecting the optimal hyperplane is
that the vector point should be as far away from the
hyperplane as possible. We take the support vector machine
as a machine learning model as a representative to compare
with the following machine model.
B. Convolutional Neural Network
This paper uses various forms of convolutional neural
networks for comparison.
a. CNN model
As introduced in the previous discussion about basic
machine learning methods, CNN can automatically extract
features through convolution and pooling, avoiding the
process of manually extracting features. In order to verify the
performance of the convolutional neural network, we first
used the standard convolutional neural network model. The
convolutional neural network model we use contains 4
convolutional layers and 4 pooling layers. The size of the
convolution kernel of each convolution layer is 3×3, but the
number of convolution kernels are 32, 64, 64 and 128
respectively. The window size of the pooling layer is 2×2.
After the output of the convolutional layer is expanded, it is
connected to a fully connected layer with 128 neurons. The
activation function used by this fully connected layer is the
ReLU function. Finally, different types of output results are
generated by an output layer with 2 neurons, and the
activation function used by this output layer is the softmax
function. The final total number of parameters of this model
is 3,453,634.
We show the CNN model we used in Figure 1.
 Figure 1. The CNN model used in this study.
b. Data augmentation
The data augmentation technology generates similar but
different training samples by making a series of random
changes to the training images, thereby expanding the size of
the training data set. Randomly changing the training
samples can reduce the model's dependence on certain
attributes, thereby improving the generalization ability of the
model. For example, we can crop the image in different ways
to make the object of interest appear in different positions,
thereby reducing the dependence of the model on the
position of the object. We can also adjust factors such as
brightness and color to reduce the model's sensitivity to
color. Therefore, we added image recognition technology
without changing the model to see if the accuracy of the
model has been improved.
V. RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
A. Experiment Setting
We conducted a series of experiments in this paper. The
experiments used a desktop computer with Windows 10 OS.
Python is used as the major programming language. OpenCV
is used to manipulate the images. SVM model is
implemented with scikit-learn and the deep learning models
are implemented with TensorFlow.
The parameters for training the convolutional neural
networks are set as follows: the training epoch is 30, the
batch size is 10, the loss function is cross entropy and the
final evaluation metric is accuracy.
Specifically, we conducted the following experiments.
Firstly, we compared the performance of the SVM and CNN
models. Both models used the same original dataset. Then
for the CNN model, we compared the cases with and without
the data augmentation technique. Then we kept using the
data augmentation technique, instead changed the different
parameters. The first change is the optimizer, by replacing
Adam with SGD and RMSprop. The second change is the
kernel size, by replacing 3 with 5. The third and last change
is the activation function, by replacing ReLU with
LeakyReLu. We show these two functions in Figure 2, in
which the parameter a is set to 0.1 empirically.
B. Result Analysis
We show the test accuracy for different models in Figure
3.

f (y) f (y)

f (y) = y f (y) = y

f (y) = 0 y y
f (y) = ay

Figure 2. ReLu and LeakyReLU.

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 Figure 5. The change of loss when data augmentation is not
used.

Figure 3. The comparison of different models.

From Figure 3, we have the following findings:
(1) CNN performs better than SVM;
(2) The data augmentation technique is helpful in
improving the deep learning model’s performance;
(3) In the choice of optimizers, Adam is better than both
SGD and RMSprop;
(4) In the choice of the convolution kernel, the size of 3
is better than the size of 5;
(5) In the choice of the activation function, LeakyReLU
is better than ReLU.
We also evaluated the change of accuracy and loss during
the training process, for different parameter settings. Firstly, Figure 6. The change of accuracy when data augmentation
we found that when data augmentation was not used, the and LeakyReLU are used.
CNN model is prone to overfitting. The changes of accuracy
and loss are shown in Figure 4 and 5, respectively. Then,
after we added the data augmentation technique and replaced
ReLU with LeakyReLU, we achieved the best result so far.
For the best case, the changes of accuracy and loss are shown
in Figure 6 and 7, respectively. The validation accuracy has a
great fluctuation in Figure 6 because we only use 4000
images for validation.

Figure 7. The change of loss when data augmentation and

LeakyReLU are used.

VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we take the cat and dog classification
problem as an example, evaluate the machine learning
represented by SVM and the deep learning model
Figure 4. The change of accuracy when data augmentation is represented by CNN, and verify that CNN is superior to
not used. SVM in image classification. We also analyzed the influence
of different parameters on the CNN model. Our results can
provide a reference for the selection of corresponding
parameters for similar problems.
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