Multi-Task Convolutional Learning for Flame Characterization

Abstract: This thesis explores multi-task learning for combustion flame characterization i.e to learn different characteristics of the combustion flame. We propose a multi-task convolutional neural network for two tasks i.e. PFR (Pilot fuel ratio) and fuel type classification based on the images of stable combustion. We utilize transfer learning and adopt VGG16 to develop a multi-task convolutional neural network to jointly learn the aforementioned tasks. We also compare the performance of the individual CNN model for two tasks with multi-task CNN which learns these two tasks jointly by sharing visual knowledge among the tasks. We share the effectiveness of our proposed approach to a private company’s dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work being done for jointly learning different characteristics of the combustion flame.