Introduction to Convolution Neural Network

A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a type of Deep

Learning neural network architecture commonly used in Computer
Vision. Computer vision is a field of Artificial Intelligence that
enables a computer to understand and interpret the image or visual
data.
When it comes to Machine Learning, Artificial Neural
Networks perform really well. Neural Networks are used in various
datasets like images, audio, and text. Different types of Neural
Networks are used for different purposes, for example for predicting
the sequence of words we use Recurrent Neural Networks more
precisely an LSTM, similarly for image classification we use
Convolution Neural networks.

In a regular Neural Network there are three types of layers:

1. Input Layers: It’s the layer in which we give input to our
model. The number of neurons in this layer is equal to the
total number of features in our data (number of pixels in the
case of an image).
2. Hidden Layer: The input from the Input layer is then fed
into the hidden layer. There can be many hidden layers
depending on model and data size. Each hidden layer can
have different numbers of neurons which are generally
greater than the number of features. The output from each
layer is computed by matrix multiplication of the output of
the previous layer with learnable weights of that layer and
then by the addition of learnable biases followed by
activation function which makes the network nonlinear.
3. Output Layer: The output from the hidden layer is then fed
into a logistic function like sigmoid or softmax which
converts the output of each class into the probability score
of each class.

The data is fed into the model and output from each layer is
obtained from the above step is called feedforward, we then
calculate the error using an error function, some common error
functions are cross-entropy, square loss error, etc. The error
function measures how well the network is performing. After that,
we backpropagate into the model by calculating the derivatives.
This step is called Backpropagation which basically is used to
minimize the loss.

Convolution Neural Network

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is the extended version
of artificial neural networks (ANN) which is predominantly used to
extract the feature from the grid-like matrix dataset. For example
visual datasets like images or videos where data patterns play an
extensive role.

CNN architecture
Convolutional Neural Network consists of multiple layers like the
input layer, Convolutional layer, Pooling layer, and fully connected
layers.

Simple CNN architecture

The Convolutional layer applies filters to the input image to extract

features, the Pooling layer downsamples the image to reduce
computation, and the fully connected layer makes the final
prediction. The network learns the optimal filters through
backpropagation and gradient descent.

How Convolutional Layers works

Convolution Neural Networks or covnets are neural networks that
share their parameters. Imagine you have an image. It can be
represented as a cuboid having its length, width (dimension of the
image), and height (i.e the channel as images generally have red,
green, and blue channels).

Now imagine taking a small patch of this image and running a small
neural network, called a filter or kernel( A filter, or kernel, in a CNN is
a small matrix of weights that slides over the input data (such as an
image), performs element-wise multiplication with the part of the input
it is currently on, and then sums up all the results into a single output
pixel) on it, with say, K outputs and representing them vertically.
Now slide that neural network across the whole image, as a result,
we will get another image with different widths, heights, and
depths. Instead of just R, G, and B channels now we have more
channels but lesser width and height. This operation is
called Convolution. If the patch size is the same as that of the
image it will be a regular neural network. Because of this small
patch, we have fewer weights.

Image source: Deep Learning Udacity

Now let’s talk about a bit of mathematics that is involved in the

whole convolution process.
  Convolution layers consist of a set of learnable filters (or
kernels) having small widths and heights and the same
depth as that of input volume (3 if the input layer is image
input).
 For example, if we have to run convolution on an image
with dimensions 34x34x3. The possible size of filters can be
axax3, where ‘a’ can be anything like 3, 5, or 7 but smaller
as compared to the image dimension.
 During the forward pass, we slide each filter across the
whole input volume step by step where each step is
called stride (which can have a value of 2, 3, or even 4 for
high-dimensional images) and compute the dot product
between the kernel weights and patch from input volume.
 As we slide our filters we’ll get a 2-D output for each filter
and we’ll stack them together as a result, we’ll get output
volume having a depth equal to the number of filters. The
network will learn all the filters.

Layers used to build ConvNets

A complete Convolution Neural Networks architecture is also known
as covnets. A covnets is a sequence of layers, and every layer
transforms one volume to another through a differentiable
function.
Types of layers: datasets
Let’s take an example by running a covnets on of image of
dimension 32 x 32 x 3.
 Input Layers: It’s the layer in which we give input to our
model. In CNN, Generally, the input will be an image or a
sequence of images. This layer holds the raw input of the
image with width 32, height 32, and depth 3.
 Convolutional Layers: This is the layer, which is used to
extract the feature from the input dataset. It applies a set
of learnable filters known as the kernels to the input
images. The filters/kernels are smaller matrices usually
2×2, 3×3, or 5×5 shape. it slides over the input image data
and computes the dot product between kernel weight and
the corresponding input image patch. The output of this
layer is referred as feature maps. Suppose we use a total of
12 filters for this layer we’ll get an output volume of
dimension 32 x 32 x 12.
  Activation Layer: By adding an activation function to the
output of the preceding layer, activation layers add
nonlinearity to the network. it will apply an element-wise
activation function to the output of the convolution layer.
Some common activation functions are RELU: max(0, x),
Tanh, Leaky RELU, etc. The volume remains unchanged
hence output volume will have dimensions 32 x 32 x 12.
 Pooling layer: This layer is periodically inserted in the
covnets and its main function is to reduce the size of
volume which makes the computation fast reduces memory
and also prevents overfitting. Two common types of pooling
layers are max pooling and average pooling. If we use a
max pool with 2 x 2 filters and stride 2, the resultant
volume will be of dimension 16x16x12.

Image source: cs231n.stanford.edu

 Flattening: The resulting feature maps are flattened into a

one-dimensional vector after the convolution and pooling
layers so they can be passed into a completely linked layer
for categorization or regression.
 Fully Connected Layers: It takes the input from the
previous layer and computes the final classification or
regression task.
Image source: cs231n.stanford.edu

Output Layer: The output from the fully connected layers

is then fed into a logistic function for classification tasks
like sigmoid or softmax which converts the output of each
class into the probability score of each class.
Example:
Let’s consider an image and apply the convolution layer, activation
layer, and pooling layer operation to extract the inside feature.
Input image:
Input image

Step:
 import the necessary libraries
 set the parameter
 define the kernel
 Load the image and plot it.
 Reformat the image
 Apply convolution layer operation and plot the output
image.
 Apply activation layer operation and plot the output image.
 Apply pooling layer operation and plot the output image.
Python3

# import the necessary libraries

import numpy as np

import tensorflow as tf

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

from itertools import product

# set the param

plt.rc('figure', autolayout=True)

plt.rc('image', cmap='magma')

# define the kernel

kernel = tf.constant([[-1, -1, -1],

[-1, 8, -1],

[-1, -1, -1],

])

# load the image

image = tf.io.read_file('Ganesh.jpg')
image = tf.io.decode_jpeg(image, channels=1)

image = tf.image.resize(image, size=[300, 300])

# plot the image

img = tf.squeeze(image).numpy()

plt.figure(figsize=(5, 5))

plt.imshow(img, cmap='gray')

plt.axis('off')

plt.title('Original Gray Scale image')

plt.show();

# Reformat

image = tf.image.convert_image_dtype(image, dtype=tf.float32)

image = tf.expand_dims(image, axis=0)

kernel = tf.reshape(kernel, [*kernel.shape, 1, 1])

kernel = tf.cast(kernel, dtype=tf.float32)

# convolution layer

conv_fn = tf.nn.conv2d

image_filter = conv_fn(

input=image,

filters=kernel,

strides=1, # or (1, 1)

padding='SAME',

plt.figure(figsize=(15, 5))

# Plot the convolved image

plt.subplot(1, 3, 1)

plt.imshow(

tf.squeeze(image_filter)

plt.axis('off')
plt.title('Convolution')

# activation layer

relu_fn = tf.nn.relu

# Image detection

image_detect = relu_fn(image_filter)

plt.subplot(1, 3, 2)

plt.imshow(

# Reformat for plotting

tf.squeeze(image_detect)

plt.axis('off')

plt.title('Activation')

# Pooling layer

pool = tf.nn.pool

image_condense = pool(input=image_detect,
 window_shape=(2, 2),

pooling_type='MAX',

strides=(2, 2),

padding='SAME',

plt.subplot(1, 3, 3)

plt.imshow(tf.squeeze(image_condense))

plt.axis('off')

plt.title('Pooling')

plt.show()

Output:
Original Grayscale image

Output

Advantages of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs):

1. Good at detecting patterns and features in images, videos,
and audio signals.
2. Robust to translation, rotation, and scaling invariance.
3. End-to-end training, no need for manual feature extraction.
4. Can handle large amounts of data and achieve high
accuracy.
Disadvantages of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs):
1. Computationally expensive to train and require a lot of
memory.
2. Can be prone to overfitting if not enough data or proper
regularization is used.
3. Requires large amounts of labeled data.
4. Interpretability is limited, it’s hard to understand what the
network has learned.