In this chapter, we will cover one of the most popular and widely used deep neural networks—the convolutional neural network (CNN, also known as ConvNet).
It is this class of neural networks that is largely responsible for the incredible feats that have been accomplished in computer vision over the last few years, starting with AlexNet, created by Alex Krizhevsky, Geoffrey Hinton, and Ilya Sutskever, which outperformed all the other models in the 2012 ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC), thus beginning the deep learning revolution.
ConvNets are a very powerful type of neural network for processing data. They have a grid-like topology (that is, there is a spatial correlation between neighboring points) and are tremendously useful in a variety of applications, such as facial recognition, self-driving cars, surveillance...
