We Need to Rethink Convolutional Neural Networks

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown impressive state-of-the-art performance on multiple standard datasets, and no doubt they have been instrumental in the development and research acceleration around the field of image processing. Researchers often have a problem of getting too wrapped in the closed world of theory and perfect datasets. Unfortunately, chasing extra fractions of percentage points on accuracy is actually counterproductive to the real usages of image processing: the real world. When algorithms and methods are designed with the noiseless and perfectly predictable world of a dataset in mind, they very well may perform poorly in the real world. This has certainly shown to be the case.