Thursday, September 6, 2018

What’s the Difference Between a CNN and an RNN?

The hit 1982 TV series Knight Rider, starring David Hasselhoff and a futuristic crime-fighting Pontiac Firebird, was prophetic. The self-driving, talking car also offers a Hollywood lesson in image and language recognition. If scripted today, Hasselhoff’s AI car, dubbed KITT, would feature deep learning from convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks to see, hear and talk.

That’s because CNNs are the image crunchers now used by machines — the eyes — to identify objects. And RNNs are the mathematical engines — the ears and mouth — used to parse language patterns. Fast-forward from the ‘80s, and CNNs are today’s eyes of autonomous vehicles, oil exploration and fusion energy research. They can help spot diseases faster in medical imaging and save lives.