Pre-Trained Convolutional Neural Network for Classification of Tanning Leather Image

Leather craft products, such as belt, gloves, shoes, bag, and wallet are mainly originated from cow, crocodile, lizard, goat, sheep, buffalo, and stingray skin. Before the skins are used as leather craft materials, they go through a tanning process. With the rapid development of leather craft industry, an automation system for leather tanning factories is important to achieve large scale production in order to meet the demand of leather craft materials. The challenges in automatic leather grading system based on type and quality of leather are the skin color and texture after tanning process will have a large variety within the same skin category and have high similarity with the other skin categories. Furthermore, skin from different part of animal body may have different color and texture. Therefore, a leather classification method on tanning leather image is proposed. The method uses pre-trained deep convolution neural network (CNN) to extract rich features from tanning leather image and Support Vector Machine (SVM) to classify the features into several types of leather. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed method can classify various types of leather with good accuracy and superior to other state-of-the-art leather classification method in terms of accuracy and computational time. Keywords—Leather classification; tanning leather; convolution neural network (CNN); deep learning; support vector machine (SVM)