Reviews: Do Deep Neural Networks Suffer from Crowding?

This paper studies if crowding, a visual effect suffered by human visual systems, happens to deep neural network as well. The paper systematically analyzes the performance difference when (1) clutter/flankers is present; (2) the similarity and proximity to the target; (3) when different architectures of the network is used. Pros: There are very few papers to study if various visual perceptual phenomenon exists in deep neural nets, or in vision algorithms in general. This paper studies the effect of crowding in DNN/DCNN image classification problem, and presents some interesting results which seems to suggest similar effect exists in DNN because of pooling layers merges nearby responses. And this is related to the theories of crowding in humans, which is also interesting.