Transfer learning: classifying balanced and imbalanced fungus images using inceptionV3

Identifying the genus of fungi is known to facilitate the discovery of new medicinal compounds. Currently, the isolation and identification process is predominantly conducted in the laboratory using molecular samples. However, mastering this process requires specific skills, making it a challenging task. Apart from that, the rapid and highly accurate identification of fungus microbes remains a persistent challenge. Here, we employ a deep learning technique to classify fungus images for both balanced and imbalanced datasets. This research used transfer learning to classify fungus from the genera Aspergillus, Cladosporium, and Fusarium using InceptionV3 model. Two experiments were run using the balanced dataset and the imbalanced dataset, respectively. Thorough experiments were conducted and model effectiveness was evaluated with standard metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. Using the trendline of deviation knew the optimum result of the epoch in each experimental model. The evaluation results show that both experiments have good accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. A range of epochs in the accuracy and loss trendline curve can be found through the experiment with the balanced, even though the imbalanced dataset experiment could not. However, the validation results are still quite accurate even close to the balanced dataset accuracy.