Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition
This work addresses the problem of improving image recognition accuracy for computer vision applications, representing a foundational advancement rather than an incremental one.
The authors investigated how increasing convolutional network depth affects accuracy in large-scale image recognition, achieving significant improvements over prior art by pushing depth to 16-19 weight layers with small 3x3 filters, which led to first and second places in the ImageNet Challenge 2014 localization and classification tracks.
In this work we investigate the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting. Our main contribution is a thorough evaluation of networks of increasing depth using an architecture with very small (3x3) convolution filters, which shows that a significant improvement on the prior-art configurations can be achieved by pushing the depth to 16-19 weight layers. These findings were the basis of our ImageNet Challenge 2014 submission, where our team secured the first and the second places in the localisation and classification tracks respectively. We also show that our representations generalise well to other datasets, where they achieve state-of-the-art results. We have made our two best-performing ConvNet models publicly available to facilitate further research on the use of deep visual representations in computer vision.