Exploring Batch Normalization’s Impact on Dense Layers of Multiclass and Multilabel Classifiers

Leveraging batch normalization (BN) is crucial for deep learning for quick and precise identification of objects. It is a commonly used approach to reduce the variation of input distribution using BN. However, the complex parameters computed at the classifier layer of convolutional neural network (CNN) are the reason for model overfitting and consumption of long training time. This study is proposed to make a comparative analysis of models’ performances on multiclass and multilabel classifiers with and without BN at dense layers of CNN. Consequently, for both classifications, BN layers are incorporated at the fully connected layer of CNN. To build a model, we used datasets of medical plant leaves, potato leaves, and fashion images. The pretrained models such as Mobile Net, VGG16, and Inception Net are customized (tuned) using the transfer learning technique. We made adjustments to training and model hyperparameters, including batch size, number of layers, learning rate, number of epochs, and optimizers. After several experiments on the three models, we observed that the best way to improve the model’s accuracy is by applying BN at the CNN’s dense layer. BN improved the performances of the models on both multiclass and multilabel classifications. This improvement has more significant change in the multilabel classification. Hence, using medicinal plant dataset, the model achieved accuracy of 93% and 83% for multilabel with and without BN, respectively, while achieving 99.2% and 99% for multiclass classification. The experiment also proved that the effectiveness of BN is affected on type datasets, depth of CNN, and batch sizes.