Convolutional Neural Networks: Step by Step

Welcome to Course 4's first assignment! In this assignment, you will implement convolutional (CONV) and pooling (POOL) layers in numpy, including both forward propagation and (optionally) backward propagation.

Notation:

We assume that you are already familiar with numpy and/or have completed the previous courses of the specialization. Let's get started!

Updates

If you were working on the notebook before this update...

List of updates

1 - Packages

Let's first import all the packages that you will need during this assignment.

2 - Outline of the Assignment

You will be implementing the building blocks of a convolutional neural network! Each function you will implement will have detailed instructions that will walk you through the steps needed:

This notebook will ask you to implement these functions from scratch in numpy. In the next notebook, you will use the TensorFlow equivalents of these functions to build the following model:

Note that for every forward function, there is its corresponding backward equivalent. Hence, at every step of your forward module you will store some parameters in a cache. These parameters are used to compute gradients during backpropagation.

3 - Convolutional Neural Networks

Although programming frameworks make convolutions easy to use, they remain one of the hardest concepts to understand in Deep Learning. A convolution layer transforms an input volume into an output volume of different size, as shown below.

In this part, you will build every step of the convolution layer. You will first implement two helper functions: one for zero padding and the other for computing the convolution function itself.

3.1 - Zero-Padding

Zero-padding adds zeros around the border of an image:

**Figure 1** : **Zero-Padding**
Image (3 channels, RGB) with a padding of 2.

The main benefits of padding are the following:

  • It allows you to use a CONV layer without necessarily shrinking the height and width of the volumes. This is important for building deeper networks, since otherwise the height/width would shrink as you go to deeper layers. An important special case is the "same" convolution, in which the height/width is exactly preserved after one layer.

  • It helps us keep more of the information at the border of an image. Without padding, very few values at the next layer would be affected by pixels as the edges of an image.

Exercise: Implement the following function, which pads all the images of a batch of examples X with zeros. Use np.pad. Note if you want to pad the array "a" of shape $(5,5,5,5,5)$ with pad = 1 for the 2nd dimension, pad = 3 for the 4th dimension and pad = 0 for the rest, you would do:

a = np.pad(a, ((0,0), (1,1), (0,0), (3,3), (0,0)), mode='constant', constant_values = (0,0))