It is not an exaggeration to say that the huge growth of interest in deep learning can be mostly attributed to convolutional neural networks. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the main building blocks of image classification models in deep learning, and have replaced most techniques that were previously used by specialists in the field. Deep learning models are now the de facto method to perform all large-scale image tasks, including image classification, object detection, detecting artificially generated images, and even attributing text descriptions to images. In this chapter, we will look at some of these techniques.
Why are CNNs so important? To explain why, we can look at the history of the ImageNet competition. The ImageNet competition is an open large-scale image classification challenge that has one thousand...