Elements of Deep Learning for Computer Vision: Explore Deep Neural Network Architectures, PyTorch, Object Detection Algorithms, and Computer Vision Applications for Python Coders (English Edition)

SECTION 1

Introductory Concepts

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

-Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future (revised edition, 1973)

The upcoming three chapters mark the introductory section of this book. These chapters explain details about AI and deep learning, that are essential, and recommended for readers to understand the upcoming sections; you can move to Section 2: Computer Vision if you already have a good understanding of the basic concepts.

CHAPTER 1

An Introduction to Deep Learning

In this chapter we will understand the basics of deep learning (DL) and how it is a subset of the popular terms i.e. Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We need to know how AI works and how it serves our purpose, there are many definitions developed by different people in society, which unless understood properly can cause confusion. We will dive deep into the background of these terms to understand their origins and how AI has evolved through the years.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

Deep learning and its basic concepts

Artificial intelligence, deep learning, and machine learning

History of AI and relationship with data science

Focus of this book i.e. computer vision

A brief understanding of a popular neural network developed by the University of Oxford

Future of deep learning

Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:

Understand how AI has evolved through the years from 1950s to 2020s.

Understand the meaning of AI, ML, neural networks and deep learning.

Develop an intuition of how neural networks look like.

Figure 1.1: Artificial intelligence hierarchy

1.1 Artificial intelligence

There has been a huge hype about AI and data science in some recent years, from engineers and researchers to data analysts and business decision makers, everyone has been able to relate their work and have found a keen curiosity in understanding these terms. Many companies have promised a future of driverless cars, intelligent robots to reduce the human manual effort, or to be handled only by robots/AI altogether. The economist also mentions that data has become more valuable than oil [12] and data, information and knowledge further attributes to the development of AI but how do we define intelligence? Ability to understand patterns and predict? Many abilities represent intelligence but once we are able to explain it, it doesn't seem so intelligent.

Some see it as automation or to reduce manual effort and human error, while many have seen it as a decision making support by first analyzing data and then forecasting. AI has been known to exist from a long time and is probably older than many people reading this book. AI has existed since the 1950s when only a handful of computer science experts started asking if computers could be made to think. We are going to study the vision challenge of AI and by the end of this book, you will be able to develop various different computer vision-based applications which can be used in an AI agent to provide aid visually.

AI is not a single algorithm which performs a single intelligent task but a complete infrastructure that successfully automates the tasks humans generally perform and require intelligence.

AI currently is termed along with Machine learning and deep learning, while earlier the approach to make an AI was to find and automate all the sub tasks of a bigger task or automating a set of rules rather than the algorithm learning to make decisions. For example, for automating a chess game, earlier the tasks were hard coded with a huge set of rules and there was no particular learning involved. This type of approach to AI was known as symbolic AI and until the 1980s it was the primary practice. But if symbolic AI was able to play chess and can be referred to as an intelligence, why do we need machine learning or deep learning? Even though symbolic AI can perform really well in chess and can be a good approach, it is really complex and is not able to perform tasks like image classification, language translation, etc. Hence, we reach at another explanation of AI, that AI must be developed from experience rather than programming tasks.

An AI is a program whose behavior is substantially determined by its experience rather than its original programming. Experience may consist of observation, data mining, receiving instruction, or problem analysis.

—Conrad McDonnell

One of the most popular personalities in AI, Andrew Ng, also made a bold claim about AI in regards to automation, that any decision made by a person within a second can and should be automated, while this statement can be totally correct but some 1 second decisions might also require us to make decisions which might take more than a second to perform.

In order to understand deep learning conceptually, we need to first dive into ML and neural networks which would form the basics of deep learning and the upcoming chapters in this book.