PMAL: A Proxy Model Active Learning Approach for Vision Based Industrial Applications

Deep Learning models’ performance strongly correlate with availability of annotated data; however, massive data labeling is laborious, expensive, and error-prone when performed by human experts. Active Learning (AL) effectively handles this challenge by selecting the uncertain samples from unlabeled data collection, but the existing AL approaches involve repetitive human feedback for labeling uncertain samples, thus rendering these techniques infeasible to be deployed in industry related real-world applications. In the proposed Proxy Model based Active Learning technique (PMAL), this issue is addressed by replacing human oracle with a deep learning model, where human expertise is reduced to label only two small subsets of data for training proxy model and initializing the AL loop. In the PMAL technique, firstly, proxy model is trained with a small subset of labeled data, which subsequently acts as an oracle for annotating uncertain samples. Secondly, active model's training, uncertain samples extraction via uncertainty sampling, and annotation through proxy model is carried out until predefined iterations to achieve higher accuracy and labeled data. Finally, the active model is evaluated using testing data to verify the effectiveness of our technique for practical applications. The correct annotations by the proxy model are ensured by employing the potentials of explainable artificial intelligence. Similarly, emerging vision transformer is used as an active model to achieve maximum accuracy. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of minimum labeled data usage and improves the accuracy with 2.2%, 2.6%, and 1.35% on Caltech-101, Caltech-256, and CIFAR-10 datasets, respectively. Since the proposed technique offers a highly reasonable solution to exploit huge multimedia data, it can be widely used in different evolutionary industrial domains.