  Machine learning methods are used today for most recognition problems.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have time and again proved successful for
many image processing tasks primarily for their architecture. In this paper we
propose to apply CNN to small data sets like for example, personal albums or
other similar environs where the size of training dataset is a limitation,
within the framework of a proposed hybrid CNN-AIS model. We use Artificial
Immune System Principles to enhance small size of training data set. A layer of
Clonal Selection is added to the local filtering and max pooling of CNN
Architecture. The proposed Architecture is evaluated using the standard MNIST
dataset by limiting the data size and also with a small personal data sample
belonging to two different classes. Experimental results show that the proposed
hybrid CNN-AIS based recognition engine works well when the size of training
data is limited in size
