Abstract
Image classification is a core field in the research area of image processing and computer vision in which vehicle classification is a critical domain. The purpose of vehicle categorization is to formulate a compact system to assist in real-world problems and applications such as security, traffic analysis, and self driving and autonomous vehicles. The recent revolution in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence has provided an immense amount of support for image processing related problems and has overtaken the conventional, and handcrafted means of solving image analysis problems. In this paper, a combination of pre-trained CNN GoogleNet and a nature-inspired problem optimization scheme, particle swarm optimization (PSO), was employed for autonomous vehicle classification. The model was trained on a vehicle image dataset obtained from Kaggle that has been suitably augmented. The trained model was classified using several classifiers; however, the Cubic SVM (CSVM) classifier was found to outperform the others in both time consumption and accuracy (94.8%). The results obtained from empirical evaluations and statistical tests reveal that the model itself has shown to outperform the other related models not only in terms of accuracy (94.8%) but also in terms of training time (82.7 s) and speed prediction (380 obs/sec).