The building blocks of CNNs

CNNs are a family of models that were originally inspired by how the visual cortex of the human brain works when recognizing objects. The development of CNNs goes back to the 1990s, when Yann LeCun and his colleagues proposed a novel NN architecture for classifying handwritten digits from images (Handwritten Digit Recognition with a Back-Propagation Network, Y. LeCun, and others, 1989, published at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference).

The human visual cortex

The original discovery of how the visual cortex of our brain functions was made by David H. Hubel and Torsten Wiesel in 1959, when they inserted a microelectrode into the primary visual cortex of an anesthetized cat. Then, they observed that brain neurons respond differently after projecting different patterns of light in front of the cat. This eventually led to the discovery of the different layers of the visual cortex. While the primary layer mainly detects...