  We propose a local modelling approach using deep convolutional neural
networks (CNNs) for fine-grained image classification. Recently, deep CNNs
trained from large datasets have considerably improved the performance of
object recognition. However, to date there has been limited work using these
deep CNNs as local feature extractors. This partly stems from CNNs having
internal representations which are high dimensional, thereby making such
representations difficult to model using stochastic models. To overcome this
issue, we propose to reduce the dimensionality of one of the internal fully
connected layers, in conjunction with layer-restricted retraining to avoid
retraining the entire network. The distribution of low-dimensional features
obtained from the modified layer is then modelled using a Gaussian mixture
model. Comparative experiments show that considerable performance improvements
can be achieved on the challenging Fish and UEC FOOD-100 datasets.
