Build Your First Image Classification Model with The MNIST Dataset.

How CNN’s Became The Game Changer For ML Practitioners

Convolutional Neural Networks ( CNNs) are a category of Neural Networks that have proven very effective in areas such as image recognition and classification. CNN has been successful in identifying faces, objects, and traffic signs apart from powering vision in robots and self-driving cars.

figure1.CNN classifying cat or dog

There are four main operations in the CNN:

1. Convolution
2. Non Linearity (ReLU)
3. Pooling layers
4. Classification (Fully Connected Layer)

These operations are the basic building blocks of every Convolutional Neural Network, so understanding how this work is an important step to developing a sound understanding of CNN. We will try to understand the intuition behind each of these operations below.

An Image is a matrix of pixel values

Every image can be represented as a matrix of pixel values.