I've implemented my detector not on my own, but based upon an original SSD port to Keras/Tensorflow (from here) and already trained it with different variations (Belgium from scratch, pretrained with MS COCO, Transfer to Germany, Convolution frozen, fine tuned to Germany) and after weeks of Training now I can say, that Belgium with random weights from scratch is converging fastest (after only 40 epochs/2 days my custom SSD loss function is down to a value of 3) while all other variations need much more time, more epochs and loss is never falling below a value of 9. (as a comparision) learn the new Country from scratchĮven the very first detector (the one trained from scratch on the comprehensive belgium dataset), does it have any advantage, to load pretrained weights from published model Zoos (for example VGG16/COCO) and then finetune/transferlearn based on this?.Transfer learn the Network and freeze some of the convolution layers.So having a couple of examples of traffic signs in the new Country, is it better to ~~~ the following section is about my Research questions ~~~ For an overview on this Topic, I would recommend the wikipedia article The Research focuses on the problem of having a detector which is well trained and interfering on the traffic sign dataset it was trained for (I took the Belgium Traffic sign detection dataset) but when it Comes to use the detector in another Country (Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain.) the traffic signs look more or less different which results in a certain unwanted loss. In my master thesis, I am researching on transfer learning on a specific use Case, a traffic sign detector implemented as a Single Shot Detector with a VGG16 base network for classification.