An Image-based Transfer Learning Framework for Classification of E-Commerce Products

Classification of e-commerce products involves identifying the products and placing those products into the correct category. For example, men’s Nike Air Max will be in the men’s category shoes on an e-Commerce platform. Identifying the correct classification of a product from hundreds of categories is time-consuming for businesses. This research proposes an Image-based Transfer Learning Framework to classify the images into the correct category in the shortest time. The framework combines Image-based algorithms with Transfer Learning. This research compares the time to predict the category and accuracy of traditional CNN and transfer learning models such as VGG19, InceptionV3, ResNet50, and MobileNet. A visual classifier is trained CNN and transfer learning models such as VGG19, InceptionV3, ResNet50, and MobileNet. The models are trained on an e-commerce product dataset that combines the ImageNet dataset with pre-trained weights. The dataset consists of 15000 images scraped from the web. Results demonstrate that Inception V3 outperforms all other models based on a TIMING of 0.10 seconds and an accuracy of 85%.