farazk86:

But after training for over 24 hours the validation/test accuracy is about 54%, so the network did not lean much and is just random guessing.


That doesn’t seem to be the case for 5 classes, as a random guess would give you an accuracy of 20%, wouldn’t it?



 farazk86:

there are about 5 classes and each class/label has about 3000 images associated with it so there is enough variation here.


I think there might even be “too much variation” given the example images and the comparably small dataset size.
However, I’m quite impressed that the model has learned something at all (if I’m not mistaken in my first point).