Transfer Learning
In practice, very few people train an entire Convolutional Network from scratch (with random initialization), because it is relatively rare to have a dataset of sufficient size. Instead, it is common to pretrain a ConvNet on a very large dataset (e.g. ImageNet, which contains 1.2 million images with 1000 categories), and then use the ConvNet either as an initialization or a fixed feature extractor for the task of interest. The three major Transfer Learning scenarios look as follows:
ConvNet as fixed feature extractor. Take a ConvNet pretrained on ImageNet, remove the last fully-connected layer (this layer’s outputs are the 1000 class scores for a different task like ImageNet), then treat the rest of the ConvNet as a fixed feature extractor for the new dataset. In an AlexNet, this would compute a 4096-D vector for every image that contains the activations of the hidden layer immediately before the classifier. We call these featuresCNN codes. It is important for performance that these codes are ReLUd (i.e. thresholded at zero) if they were also thre