What’s So Impressive About Deep Learning?
I bet it’s more powerful than you think…
The question comes up again and again; what actually is deep learning? To understand deep learning let’s start with a simple use case to frame our explanation around. That use case is one of a self driving car.
A self driving car is an autonomous vehicle that drives itself without any human intervention. This driving is broken down into three primary activities: see, decide, act. For example I see a red light, I decide to stop, I put on the brakes. But in this case the car is doing everything on its own. So where does deep learning come into it? Let’s focus on the “see” by explaining how deep learning works in the context of image recognition.
Image Recognition
When you take a picture of something, your brain processes all the information that it receives from the camera and converts it into an image. Deep learning is a subfield of machine learning that focuses on computer vision and that attempts to mimic the human brain’s ability to recognise objects in images.
We can look at images in a two dimensional plane, but an object’s three dimensional shape and position in space can be just as useful. Because of this, visual recognition can be broken up into classification and localisation. Classification identifies an…
