Illustrated: 10 CNN Architectures

A compiled visualisation of the common convolutional neural networks

(TL;DR — jump to the illustrations here)

Changelog: 24 Sep 2020 – Edited “What’s novel” section for ResNeXt-50.

How have you been keeping up with the different convolutional neural networks (CNNs)? In recent years, we have witnessed the birth of numerous CNNs. These networks have gotten so deep that it has become extremely difficult to visualise the entire model. We stop keeping track of them and treat them as blackbox models.

Fine, maybe you don’t. But if you’re guilty too then hey, you’ve come to the right place! This article is a visualisation of 10 common CNN architectures, hand-picked by yours truly. These illustrations provide a more compact view of the entire model, without having to scroll down a couple of times just to see the softmax layer. Apart from these images, I’ve also sprinkled some notes on how they ‘evolved’ over time — from 5 to 50 convolutional layers, from plain convolutional layers to modules, from 2–3 towers to 32 towers, from 7⨉7 to 5⨉5— but more on these later.