Comparative Analysis of Custom and Pre-Trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for Object Recognition on the Cifar-10 Dataset

Abstract

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have significantly changed image classification over the years by allowing computers to learn features directly from raw pixel data. However, deciding between building a customised model and using a pre-trained one can be a difficult task, especially when working with small datasets. In this study, we compare a custom CNN with three pre-trained models—VGG16, ResNet50, and MobileNetV2—on the CIFAR-10 dataset, which comprises 60,000 colour images (32×32 pixels) across 10 categories. We measured model performance using accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and training time. The results show that pre-trained models performed much better than the customised model. ResNet50 had the highest accuracy at 92.4%. However, MobileNetV2 gave the best mix of speed (1,800 seconds to train) and accuracy (90.2%). The custom CNN reached 82.3% accuracy, used less memory, and did not need image resizing. These results offer clear benchmarks for choosing models in the face of limited resources. They also demonstrate that transfer learning can achieve strong performance, while showing that custom CNNs remain useful for learning and simple tasks.