Deep Learning Model with Transfer Learning to Infer Personal Preferences in Images

Featured Application Image-based personal recommendation system superior to human experts on customized interiors. In this paper, we propose a deep convolutional neural network model with transfer learning that reflects personal preferences from inter-domain databases of images having atypical visual characteristics. The proposed model utilized three public image databases (Fashion-MNIST, Labeled Faces in the Wild [LFW], and Indoor Scene Recognition) that include images with atypical visual characteristics in order to train and infer personal visual preferences. The effectiveness of transfer learning for incremental preference learning was verified by experiments using inter-domain visual datasets with different visual characteristics. Moreover, a gradient class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) approach was applied to the proposed model, providing explanations about personal visual preference possibilities. Experiments showed that the proposed preference-learning model using transfer learning outperformed a preference model not using transfer learning. In terms of the accuracy of preference recognition, the proposed model showed a maximum of about 7.6% improvement for the LFW database and a maximum of about 9.4% improvement for the Indoor Scene Recognition database, compared to the model that did not reflect transfer learning.