The ResNet (Residual Network) model is a deep convolutional neural network architecture designed for image classification tasks. It was first introduced by He et al. in their paper "Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition" in 2015. The key innovation of ResNet is the introduction of residual connections, also known as skip connections, which allow the model to learn residual mappings rather than explicitly learning the desired underlying mappings.
In traditional deep neural networks, as the network depth increases, it becomes harder to train the model due to the vanishing gradient problem. ResNet overcomes this issue by introducing skip connections that bypass one or more layers, allowing the gradient to flow more easily during backpropagation. This enables the model to effectively train very deep networks with hundreds of layers and still achieve excellent performance.
Image Classification: ResNet models excel at image classification tasks, where the goal is to categorize images into predefined classes or labels. It has been used in various competitions such as the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC).
Object Detection: ResNet can also be used as a backbone network for object detection tasks, where the goal is to detect and localize objects within an image. Combined with additional detection layers, ResNet can provide accurate and efficient object detection models.
Transfer Learning: ResNet models pre-trained on large-scale image datasets, such as ImageNet, can be used as a starting point for transfer learning. By fine-tuning the model on a smaller, task-specific dataset, it can quickly adapt to new image classification tasks with limited labeled data.
Official ResNet Paper:
TensorFlow ResNet GitHub Repository:
PyTorch ResNet GitHub Repository: