Technical Perspective: XNOR-Networks – Powerful but Tricky

You can now run computations on your phone that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. But as small devices get smarter, we discover new uses for them that overwhelm their resources. If you want your phone to recognize a picture of your face (image classification) or to find faces in pictures (object detection), you want it to run a convolutional neural net (CNN). Modern computer vision applications are mostly built using CNNs. This is because vision applications tend to have a classifier at their heart--so, for example, one builds an object detector by building one classifier that tells whether locations in an image could contain an object, then another that determines what the object is.