What do you mean by VGG16 model? And how do we use it for Image Classification?
Ans: VGG16 is a convolutional neural network model. The model achieves 92.7% top-5 test accuracy in ImageNet, which is a dataset of over 14 million images belonging to 1000 classes.
The input to cov1 layer is of fixed size 224 x 224 RGB image. The image is passed through a stack of convolutional (conv.) layers, where the filters were used with a very small receptive field: 3×3 (which is the smallest size to capture the notion of left/right, up/down, center). In one of the configurations, it also utilizes 1×1 convolution filters, which can be seen as a linear transformation of the input channels (followed by non-linearity). The convolution stride is fixed to 1 pixel; the spatial padding of conv. layer input is such that the spatial resolution is preserved after convolution, i.e. the padding is 1-pixel for 3×3 conv. layers. Spatial pooling is carried out by five max-pooling layers, which follow some of the conv. layers (not all the conv. layers are followed by max-pooling). Max-pooling is performed over a 2×2 pixel window, with stride 2.
Three Fully-Connected (FC) layers follow a stack of convolutional layers (which has a different depth in different architectures): the first two have 4096 channels each, the third performs 1000-way ILSVRC classification and thus contains 1000 channels (one for each class). The final layer is the soft-max layer. The configuration of the fully connected layers is the same in all networks.
All hidden layers are equipped with the rectification (ReLU) non-linearity. It is also noted that none of the networks (except for one) contain Local Response Normalisation (LRN), such normalization does not improve the performance on the ILSVRC dataset, but leads to increased memory consumption and computation time. Unfortunately, there are two major drawbacks with VGGNet:
It is painfully slow to train.
The network architecture weights themselves are quite large (concerning disk/bandwidth).
Due to its depth and number of fully-connected nodes, VGG16 is over 533MB. This makes deploying VGG a tiresome task. VGG16 is used in many deep learning image classification problems.
