A Feature Fusion Method with Guided Training for Classification Tasks

In this paper, a feature fusion method with guiding training (FGT-Net) is constructed to fuse image data and numerical data for some specific recognition tasks which cannot be classified accurately only according to images. The proposed structure is divided into the shared weight network part, the feature fused layer part, and the classification layer part. First, the guided training method is proposed to optimize the training process, the representative images and training images are input into the shared weight network to learn the ability that extracts the image features better, and then the image features and numerical features are fused together in the feature fused layer to input into the classification layer for the classification task. Experiments are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model. Loss is calculated by the output of both the shared weight network and classification layer. The results of experiments show that the proposed FGT-Net achieves the accuracy of 87.8%, which is 15% higher than the CNN model of ShuffleNetv2 (which can process image data only) and 9.8% higher than the DNN method (which processes structured data only).