Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition

ABSTRACT In this work we investigate the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting. Our main contribution is a thorough evaluation of networks of increasing depth using an architecture with very small ( 3 × 3) convolution filters, which shows that a significant improvement on the prior-art configurations can be achieved by pushing the depth to 16–19 weight layers. These findings were the basis of our ImageNet Challenge 2014 submission, where our team secured the first and the second places in the localisation and classification tracks respectively. We also show that our representations generalise well to other datasets, where they achieve state-of-the-art results. We have made our two best-performing ConvNet models publicly available to facilitate further research on the use of deep visual representations in computer vision

CONCLUSION In this work we evaluated very deep convolutional networks (up to 19 weight layers) for largescale image classification. It was demonstrated that the representation depth is beneficial for the classification accuracy, and that state-of-the-art performance on the ImageNet challenge dataset can be achieved using a conventional ConvNet architecture (LeCun et al., 1989; Krizhevsky et al., 2012) with substantially increased depth. In the appendix, we also show that our models generalise well to a wide range of tasks and datasets_, matching or outperforming more complex recognition pipelines built around less deep image representations. Our results yet again confirm the importance of depth in visual representations._