# A Comparative Study of Custom CNNs, Pre-trained Models, and Transfer Learning Across Multiple Visual Datasets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02246 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02246/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [Network In Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4400/) (2013)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Medical Image Analysis: Full Training or Fine Tuning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00712/) (2017)
- [Using Deep Learning for Image-Based Plant Disease Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03169/) (2016)
- [Road Damage Detection Using Deep Neural Networks with Images Captured Through a Smartphone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09454/) (2018)
- [MangoLeafBD: A Comprehensive Image Dataset to Classify Diseased and Healthy Mango Leaves](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02377/) (2022)
- [Road Damage and Manhole Detection using Deep Learning for Smart Cities: A Polygonal Annotation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03797/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a standard approach for visual recognition due to their capacity to learn hierarchical representations from raw pixels. In practice, practitioners often choose among (i) training a compact custom CNN from scratch, (ii) using a large pre-trained CNN as a fixed feature extractor, and (iii) performing transfer learning via partial or full fine-tuning of a pre-trained backbone. This report presents a controlled comparison of these three paradigms across five real-world image classification datasets spanning road-surface defect recognition, agricultural variety identification, fruit/leaf disease recognition, pedestrian walkway encroachment recognition, and unauthorized vehicle recognition. Models are evaluated using accuracy and macro F1-score, complemented by efficiency metrics including training time per epoch and parameter counts. The results show that transfer learning consistently yields the strongest predictive performance, while the custom CNN provides an attractive efficiency--accuracy trade-off, especially when compute and memory budgets are constrained.