The present disclosure relates to processing operations that execute image classification training for domain-specific traffic, where training operations are entirely compliant with data privacy regulations and policies. Image classification model training, as described herein, is configured to classify meaningful image categories in domain-specific scenarios where there is unknown data traffic and strict data compliance requirements that result in privacy-limited image data sets. Iterative image classification training satisfies data compliance requirements through a combination of online image classification training and offline image classification training. This results in tuned image recognition classifiers that have improved accuracy and efficiency over general image recognition classifiers when working with domain-specific data traffic. One or more image recognition classifiers are independently trained and tuned to detect an image class for image classification. Training of independent image recognition classifiers is also utilized for training and tuning of deeper learning models for image classification.