About Lesson
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Local Receptive Fields:
- CNNs use local receptive fields to process small regions of the input image at a time. Each neuron in a convolutional layer is connected to a small patch of the previous layer (similar to how our visual cortex processes local regions in our visual field).
- This local connectivity allows CNNs to capture spatial hierarchies and detect local features like edges, corners, and textures.
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Convolutional Layers:
- Convolutional layers apply filters (also called kernels) to the input image. These filters slide across the entire image, computing element-wise products and summing them up.
- The output of a convolutional layer is a feature map that highlights specific patterns or features present in the input image.
- By stacking multiple convolutional layers, CNNs learn increasingly complex features.
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Pooling Layers:
- After convolutional layers, pooling layers downsample the feature maps.
- Max-pooling is a common technique where the maximum value in a small region (e.g., 2×2) is retained, reducing the spatial dimensions.
- Pooling helps make the network more robust to translations and reduces the number of parameters.
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Hierarchical Representation:
- CNNs learn hierarchical representations. Early layers detect simple features (edges, corners), and deeper layers combine these features to recognize more complex patterns (eyes, noses, etc.).
- This hierarchical approach allows CNNs to learn abstract features without needing an excessive amount of labeled data.
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Transfer Learning:
- Pre-trained CNNs (e.g., VGG, ResNet, Inception) have been trained on large datasets (e.g., ImageNet) and learned useful features.
- Fine-tuning these pre-trained models on specific tasks (e.g., classifying cats vs. dogs) is common practice. It saves training time and requires less labeled data.
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Data Augmentation:
- To combat overfitting, data augmentation techniques (such as random rotations, flips, and translations) are applied during training.
- These augmentations create variations of the input images, making the model more robust.
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Backpropagation and Optimization:
- CNNs are trained using backpropagation and optimization algorithms (e.g., stochastic gradient descent).
- The loss function guides weight updates, and gradients flow backward through the layers to adjust the filters’ weights.
CNNs excel at capturing local patterns, learning hierarchical features, and handling large-scale image data. Their success has extended beyond image classification to tasks like object detection, segmentation, and even natural language processing.
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