ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

We trained a large, deep convolutional neural network to classify the 1.2 million high-resolution images in the ImageNet LSVRC-2010 contest into the 1000 different classes. On the test data, we achieved top-1 and top-5 error rates of 37.5% and 17.0%, respectively, which is considerably better than the previous state-of-the-art. The neural network, which has 60 million parameters and 650,000 neurons, consists of five convolutional layers, some of which are followed by max-pooling layers, and three fully connected layers with a final 1000-way softmax. To make training faster, we used non-saturating neurons and a very efficient GPU implementation of the convolution operation. To reduce overfitting in the fully connected layers we employed a recently developed regularization method called "dropout" that proved to be very effective. We also entered a variant of this model in the ILSVRC-2012 competition and achieved a winning top-5 test error rate of 15.3%, compared to 26.2% achieved by the second-best entry. Four years ago, a paper by Yann LeCun and his collaborators was rejected by the leading computer vision conference on the grounds that it used neural networks and therefore provided no insight into how to design a vision system. At the time, most computer vision researchers believed that a vision system needed to be carefully hand-designed using a detailed understanding of the nature of the task. They assumed that the task of classifying objects in natural images would never be solved by simply presenting examples of images and the names of the objects they contained to a neural network that acquired all of its knowledge from this training data. What many in the vision research community failed to appreciate was that methods that require careful hand-engineering by a programmer who understands the domain do not scale as well as methods that replace the programmer with a powerful general-purpose learning procedure.