Understanding VGG Networks: A Guide for ML Engineers in Retail Computer Vision

What is VGG?

VGG (Visual Geometry Group) is a deep convolutional neural network developed by researchers at the University of Oxford.

It gained popularity after performing extremely well in the ImageNet 2014 challenge.

There are two main variants:

• VGG16–16 weight layers
• VGG19–19 weight layers

Key Characteristics:

• Depth: Comes in variants like VGG16 (16 learnable layers) and VGG19 (19 layers)
• Uniformity: Uses small 3×3 filters throughout the network
• Simplicity: Follows a consistent pattern of convolutional and pooling layers

Why VGG Matters for…