Object Recognition in Low Resolution Images using a Convolutional Neural Network and an Image Enhancement Network

Injae Choi, Jeongin Seo, Hyeyoung Park

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2018.45.8.831

Recently, the development of deep learning technologies such as convolutional neural networks have greatly improved the performance of object recognition in images. However, object recognition still has many challenges due to large variations in images and the diversity of object categories to be recognized. In particular, studies on object recognition in low-resolution images are still in the primary stage and have not shown satisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose an image enhancement neural network to improve object recognition performance of low resolution images. We also use the enhanced images for training an object recognition model based on convolutional neural networks to obtain robust recognition performance with resolution changes. To verify the efficiency of the proposed method, we conducted computational experiments on object recognition in a low-resolution environment using the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 databases. We confirmed that the proposed method can greatly improve the recognition performance in low-resolution images while keeping stable performance in the original resolution images.