Week 44, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)

Why CNNS for images, sound files, medical images from CT scans etc?

However, when we consider images, sound clips and many other similar kinds of data, these data have an intrinsic structure. More formally, they share these important properties:

They are stored as multi-dimensional arrays (think of the pixels of a figure) .
They feature one or more axes for which ordering matters (e.g., width and height axes for an image, time axis for a sound clip).
One axis, called the channel axis, is used to access different views of the data (e.g., the red, green and blue channels of a color image, or the left and right channels of a stereo audio track).

These properties are not exploited when an affine transformation is applied; in fact, all the axes are treated in the same way and the topological information is not taken into account. Still, taking advantage of the implicit structure of the data may prove very handy in solving some tasks, like computer vision and speech recognition, and in these cases it would be best to preserve it. This is where discrete convolutions come into play.

A discrete convolution is a linear transformation that preserves this notion of ordering. It is sparse (only a few input units contribute to a given output unit) and reuses parameters (the same weights are applied to multiple locations in the input).