While implementing yolo in darknet, should we train on image net data set?

Question

I have installed darknet in ubuntu and is now trying to implement object detection using yolo v2 on my custom dataset. In the yolo paper, they have told that they have pretrained the network using image net dataset. So, my question is should we also pretrain the network?

Sorry if I'm blunting. Can someone reply me?

Answer 1

For most cases, if your dataset has lots of similar feature in the pre-trained weight (e.g. person, car), you should use the pre-trained network such as darknet53.conv.74 or darknet19_448.conv.23.

But you can also train the network without using those pre-trained network (training from scratch), for example by removing the weight from the command :

./darknet detector train data/obj.data yolo-obj.cfg