History of CNNs

There have been numerous attempts to recognize pictures by machines for decades. It is a challenge to mimic the visual recognition system of the human brain in a computer. Human vision is the hardest to mimic and most complex sensory cognitive system of the brain. We will not discuss biological neurons here, that is, the primary visual cortex, but rather focus on artificial neurons. Objects in the physical world are three dimensional, whereas pictures of those objects are two dimensional. In this book, we will introduce neural networks without appealing to brain analogies. In 1963, computer scientist Larry Roberts, who is also known as the father of computer vision, described the possibility of extracting 3D geometrical information from 2D perspective views of blocks in his research dissertation titled BLOCK WORLD. This was the first breakthrough...