Convolutional Neural Networks: The Biologically-Inspired Model

CNNs was popularized mostly thanks to the effort of Yann LeCun, now the Director of AI Research at Facebook. In the early 1990s, LeCun worked at Bell Labs, one of the most prestigious research labs in the world at that time, and built a check-recognition system to read handwritten digits. There's a very cool video dated back in 1993 that LeCun showed how the system work right here. This system was actually an entire process for doing end-to-end image recognition. The resulting paper, in which he co-authored with Leon Bottou, Patrick Haffner, and Yoshua Bengio in 1998, introduces convolutional nets as well as the full end-to-end system they built.