From Convolution to Attention and Beyond: A Systematic Review of Modern Vision Architectures

Computer Vision in the Deep Learning Era: A Survey of Architectures, Datasets, and Applications

An organized and perceptive overview of computer vision's present situation and promise in the deep learning age is offered, with an emphasis on important architectures including Convolutional Neural Networks, Vision Transformers, and new hybrid models.

A Comparative Study of Deep Learning Architectures for Image Classification

Image classification is a major area in computer vision, driven by rapid advances in deep learning. Over the last decade, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and their variants have achieved high performance in applications such as medical diagnosis, autonomous driving, industrial inspection, remote sensing, and biometrics. However, choosing the right model remains challenging due to trade-offs between accuracy, computational cost, efficiency, and robustness. This paper presents a comparative study of different deep learning architectures, including classical CNNs, deep hierarchical models, residual and dense networks, and compound-scaled architectures. Using a common evaluation framework and standard datasets, the study analyzes performance based on key design factors such as depth, width, receptive field, skip connections, and normalization. Theoretical concepts like convolution operations, residual learning, and optimization are also discussed.The results show that deeper networks provide better representation, while residual connections and compound scaling improve training stability and efficiency. Lightweight models perform well in resource-limited and real-time environments. Overall, the study offers practical guidance for selecting suitable architectures and highlights future research areas such as neural architecture search, self-supervised learning, and efficient model deployment.

Performance Comparison of ALEXNET, VGG16, and ResNet on CIFAR‑10 Image Classification

Boosting Lightweight CNN-Based Networks Via Selective Residual Attentive Patterns for Image Recognition

Modern deep networks often rely on attention modules, which are still at a modest level due to using either one type of channel-wise pattern or an expensive combination of two types of them. In the case of using all of those, the obtained weights can be less discriminative due to the disjointed excitations, while the model complexity would double. To deal with these limitations, an efficient attention is proposed by addressing two novel components of residual attentive information as follows: 1) top- $n$ channel-residual attentive patterns with a unitary excitation perceptron, and 2) multiple spatial-residual attentive features. A simple fusion of these complementary components forms a robust volume of selective residual attentive patterns (named SRAP). Experiments on benchmark datasets for image classification have proved the prominent performance of SRAP versus other attention modules. Particularly, SRAP boosted the performance of lightweight CNN-based networks by up to ~7% on ImageNet-100 without increasing the computational complexity. The implementation code of SRAP is available at https://github.com/nttbdrk25/SRAP.

Texture Representations in Deep Vision Models: Comparing CNNs, Vision Transformers, and Human Perception

In computational vision science, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have emerged as a popular model of biological vision because of the alignment they can exhibit with neural and behavioral data in humans and animals. However, it remains unclear to what extent this alignment persists for visual tasks that extend beyond the canonical object recognition paradigm based on well defined semantic content. In this study, we diverge from the common object-centric view by focusing on another aspect of vision: texture perception. We consider textures of different complexity generated with three different algorithms from the same source images. Using a rank-based statistic, we quantify the information encoded in the internal representations of a CNN and three Vision Transformers (ViTs), and we compare the similarity of these representations to those inferred from human psychophysics data. We find that the representation of textures is aligned in different ViTs, but not between the ViTs and the CNN; that ViTs form similar representations for textures of different complexity; that human performance in recognizing textures can be better predicted from ViTs representations rather than CNN representations. Taken together, these results suggest that ViTs may capture more faithfully than CNNs how texture patterns are visually processed by humans, and that the representations of texture stimuli in computational models may be driven by the network architecture.

History, Development, and Principles of Representation Learning—An Introductory Survey

This survey deeply explains the basic principles of representation learning, and introduces its practical application cases in various fields, and points out the main limitations of current models and prospects the future research directions.