Validation accuracy and validation loss almost remains constant in every epoch - machine-learning

Question

I am making an autonomous farming robot for my final year project. I want to move it autonomously in lanes in side the farms. I am just using the raspberry pi image in front of my vehicle. I collect my data through pi and then send it to my computer for training.
Initially i have just trained it for moving in a straight line. As i have not used encoders in my motors so there is a possibility of its being diverging along one direction , so i have to constantly give it the feedback to stay on the right path.
Sample image is as follows, Note this is black and white image :enter image description here
I have 836 images for training and 356 for validation. When i am trying to train it, my model accuracy doesnot improves much. I have tried changing different structures, from fully connected layers to different convolutional layers, my training accuracy doesnot improves much and perhaps most of the times validation accuracy and validation loss remains same.
I am confused that why is this so, is this to do with my code or should i apply computer vision techniques on the image so that features are more prominently visible. What should be the best approach to tackle this problem.
My code is as follows:
import numpy
from keras.models import Sequential
from keras.layers import Dense
from keras.layers import Dropout
from keras.layers import Flatten
from keras.layers.convolutional import Conv2D
from keras.layers.convolutional import MaxPooling2D
# fix dimension ordering issue
from keras import backend as K
import numpy as np
import glob
import pandas as pd
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
K.set_image_dim_ordering('th')
# fix random seed for reproducibility
seed = 7
numpy.random.seed(seed)
def load_data(path):
print("Loading training data...")
training_data = glob.glob(path)[0]
data=np.load(training_data)
a=data['train']
b=data['train_labels']
s=np.concatenate((a, b), axis=1)
data=pd.DataFrame(s)
data=data.sample(frac=1)
X = data.iloc[:,:-4]
y=data.iloc[:,-4:]
print("Image array shape: ", X.shape)
print("Label array shape: ", y.shape)
# normalize data
# train validation split, 7:3
return train_test_split(X, y, test_size=0.3)
data_path = "*.npz"
X_train,X_test,y_train,y_test=load_data(data_path)
# reshape to be [samples][channels][width][height]
X_train = X_train.values.reshape(X_train.shape[0], 1, 120, 320).astype('float32')
X_test = X_test.values.reshape(X_test.shape[0], 1, 120, 320).astype('float32')
# normalize inputs from 0-255 to 0-1
X_train = X_train / 255.0
X_test = X_test / 255.0
# one hot encode outputs
num_classes = y_test.shape[1]
# define a simple CNN model
def baseline_model():
model = Sequential()
model.add(Conv2D(30, (5, 5), input_shape=(1, 120, 320), activation='relu'))
model.add(MaxPooling2D(pool_size=(2, 2)))
model.add(Conv2D(15, (3, 3), activation='relu'))
model.add(MaxPooling2D(pool_size=(2, 2)))
model.add(Dropout(0.2))
model.add(Flatten())
model.add(Dense(128, activation='relu'))
model.add(Dense(50, activation='relu'))
model.add(Dense(num_classes, activation='softmax'))
# Compile model
model.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy'])
return model
# build the model
model = baseline_model()
# Fit the model
model.fit(X_train, y_train, validation_data=(X_test, y_test), epochs=10, batch_size=10)
# Final evaluation of the model
scores = model.evaluate(X_test, y_test, verbose=0)
print("CNN Error: %.2f%%" % (100-scores[1]*100))
sample output: This is the best output and it is of the above code:
enter image description here

Answer 1

I solved this problem by changing the structure of my algorithm and using NVIDIA's deep learning car algorithm to solve this problem. The algorithm is very robust and applies basic computer vision also on it. You can easily find sample implementation for toy cars on medium/youtube also.
this article was really helpful for me:
https://towardsdatascience.com/deeppicar-part-1-102e03c83f2c
additionally this resource was also very helpful:
https://zhengludwig.wordpress.com/projects/self-driving-rc-car/