Knowing Your Dog Breed: Identifying a Dog Breed with Deep Learning

Dog breed identification is essential for many reasons, particularly for understanding individual breeds′ conditions, health concerns, interaction behavior, and natural instinct. This paper presents a solution for identifying dog breeds using their images of their faces. The proposed method applies a deep learning based approach in order to recognize their breeds. The method begins with a transfer learning by retraining existing pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on the public dog breed dataset. Then, the image augmentation with various settings is also applied on the training dataset, in order to improve the classification performance. The proposed method is evaluated using three different CNNs with various augmentation settings and comprehensive experimental comparisons. The proposed model achieves a promising accuracy of 89.92% on the published dataset with 133 dog breeds.