In this research, we compare and contrast various image classification algorithms and how effective they are in specific problem sets where data might be scarce such as prediction of rare phenomena (for example, natural calamities), enterprise solutions etc. We have employed various state-of-the-art algorithms in this study credited to have been some of the best classifiers at the time of their inception. These classifiers have also been suspected to fall prey to overfitting on the datasets they were initially tested on viz. ImageNet and Common Objects in Context (COCO); we test to what extent these classifiers tend to generalize to the new data provided by us in a transfer learning framework. We utilize transfer learning on the ImageNet classifiers to adapt to our smaller dataset and examine various techniques such as data augmentation, batch normalization, dropout etc. to mitigate overfitting. All the classifiers follow a standard fully connected architecture. The end result should provide the reader with an overall analysis of which algorithm or approach to use in conditions where data might be limited while also giving a brief overview of the progress of image classification algorithms since their advent. We also provide an analysis on the effectiveness of data augmentation in limited datasets by providing results achieved with and without utilizing data augmentation. In our case, we found the MobileNet (with its lightweight nature contributing to low computational costs) and InceptionV3 (owing to its lower training time) to be the best performing classifiers for applying transfer learning to limited datasets out of the classifiers we have used for our study. This paper aims to establish preemptive standards that can be used to evaluate the models which can be used in object recognition, and image classification for problems containing limited amounts of data.
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