Minimizing Model Size of CNN-Based Vehicle Make Recognition for Frontal Vehicle Images

Vehicle Make Model Recognition (VMMR) is commonly used in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), free-flow image-based toll systems, and enforcement systems. These systems must analyze and process vehicle front images for use as evidence. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are widely used for image classification and VMMR problems. Complex model structures and more internal parameters are needed to improve classification accuracy with many classes. Issues included larger models and longer processing times. The goal of this work is to study and create a smaller CNN model that can be used on devices with limited resources, like embedded computers and embedded computer cameras, to figure out what kind of car it is from a front view picture. Real free-flow toll systems were used to train a CNN model that recognized vehicle makes with 99% accuracy. The model is smaller than VGG16, InceptionV3, Yolo11m-cls, and ResNet50 and has over 90% accuracy. It reduced parameters by 69.95% and developed the CTv1 model to achieve an F1 score 2.06% higher than InceptionV3, the best. The model was tested on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, processing images in 1 second and using 25 mWh. The compact version of the proposed model also adjusts the Padding and Stride of the Convolutional Layer and reduces the CNN model size using Depth-wise Separable Convolutional and 1x1 Convolutional Dimension Reduction (Bottleneck) methods to test vehicle make recognition accuracy, training time, processing time, and model size.