Automatically Designing CNN Architectures Using the Genetic Algorithm for Image Classification

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have gained remarkable success on many image classification tasks in recent years. However, the performance of CNNs highly relies upon their architectures. For the most state-of-the-art CNNs, their architectures are often manually designed with expertise in both CNNs and the investigated problems. Therefore, it is difficult for users, who have no extended expertise in CNNs, to design optimal CNN architectures for their own image classification problems of interest. In this article, we propose an automatic CNN architecture design method by using genetic algorithms, to effectively address the image classification tasks. The most merit of the proposed algorithm remains in its "automatic" characteristic that users do not need domain knowledge of CNNs when using the proposed algorithm, while they can still obtain a promising CNN architecture for the given images. The proposed algorithm is validated on widely used benchmark image classification datasets, compared to the state-of-the-art peer competitors covering eight manually designed CNNs, seven automatic + manually tuning, and five automatic CNN architecture design algorithms. The experimental results indicate the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing automatic CNN architecture design algorithms in terms of classification accuracy, parameter numbers, and consumed computational resources. The proposed algorithm also shows the very comparable classification accuracy to the best one from manually designed and automatic + manually tuning CNNs, while consuming fewer computational resources.