An Intuitive Guide to Deep Network Architectures

Over the past few years, much of the progress in deep learning for computer vision can be boiled down to just a handful of neural network architectures. Setting aside all the math, the code, and the implementation details, I wanted to explore one simple question: how and why do these models work? The VGG networks, along with the earlier AlexNet from 2012, follow the now archetypal layout of basic conv nets: a series of convolutional, max-pooling, and activation layers before some fully-connected classification layers at the end. MobileNet is essentially a streamlined version of the Xception architecture optimized for mobile applications. The remaining three, however, truly redefine the way we look at neural networks.