EVERGREEN

Joint Journal of Novel Carbon Resource Sciences and Green Asia Strategy

ISSN:2189-0420 (Print until Mar 2020)
ISSN:2432-5953 (Online)

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Fine-Grained Image Classification using Particle Swarm Optimization for Hyperparameter Optimization of Convolutional Neural Networks

Priti Prasad Vaidya1,*, Snehal Kamalapur2
1Research, Panchvati, 422003, Nashik, India
2Department of Computer Engineering, K K Wagh Institute of Engineering Education and Research, India
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed:
E-mail: ppvaidya@kkwagh.edu.in (PPV)
Evergreen, Vol. 12, Iss. 03, pp. 1783–1801, 2025
DOI: 10.5109/7388865
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Received: May 26, 2025 | Revised: August 05, 2025 | Accepted: September 02, 2025 | Published: September 2025
Abstract
This study presents a novel approach to fine-grained image classification (FGIC) by employing Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for automatic hyperparameter tuning in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Unlike conventional models with manually fixed architectures, the proposed method optimizes critical parameters—such as filter count, kernel size, pooling size, and stride—tailored to each dataset. The model operates on reduced image resolutions (128×128), yet achieves superior accuracy with significantly fewer training epochs. Specifically, it attains 99.56% accuracy on the Oxford Flowers dataset, 97.45% on Stanford Cars, and 95.95% on Stanford Dogs using only 25 epochs, outperforming deep networks like DenseNet-161 and ResNet-50 trained for 100–150 epochs. This PSO-based tuning framework not only enhances classification performance but also minimizes computational cost, making it a practical and scalable solution for real-world FGIC applications.
Keywords
PSO ; CNN ; Hyperparameters ; Fine grain image classification
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