Evaluation of Transfer Learning for Visual Road Condition Assessment

Through deep learning, major advances have been made in the field of visual road condition assessment in recent years. However, many approaches train from scratch and avoid transfer learning due to the different nature of road surface data and the ImageNet dataset, which is commonly used for pre-training neural networks for visual recognition. We show that, despite the huge differences in the data, transfer learning outperforms training from scratch in terms of generalization. In extensive experiments, we explore the underlying cause by examining various transfer learning effects. For our experiments, we are incorporating seven known architectures. Therefore, this is the first comprehensive study of transfer learning in the field of visual road condition assessment.