What Are Convolutional Neural Networks?

Perhaps you've wondered how Facebook or Instagram is able to automatically recognize faces in an image, or how Google lets you search the web for similar photos just by uploading a photo of your own. These features are examples of computer vision, and they are powered by convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Yet what exactly are convolutional neural networks? Let's take a deep dive into the architecture of a CNN and understand how they operate. Before we begin talking about convolutional neural networks, let's take a moment to define regular neural networks.