Understanding AlexNet: A Step-by-Step Guide to the Architecture That Revolutionized Deep Learning

1.Overview:

AlexNet was introduced by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton in 2012 and won the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) by a huge margin. It marked the breakthrough of deep learning in computer vision.

This article will break down AlexNet’s architecture, innovations, and why it remains a cornerstone of deep learning.

2.The Birth of AlexNet

The Problem Before AlexNet

Before 2012, most computer vision models relied on hand-engineered features (like SIFT, HOG) and shallow neural networks. These models struggled with: