Visualizations of Deep Neural Networks in Computer Vision: A Survey

Abstract

In recent years, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been shown to outperform the state-of-the-art in multiple areas, such as visual object recognition, genomics and speech recognition. Due to the distributed encodings of information, DNNs are hard to understand and interpret. To this end, visualizations have been used to understand how deep architecture work in general, what different layers of the network encode, what the limitations of the trained model was and how to interactively collect user feedback. In this chapter, we provide a survey of visualizations of DNNs in the field of computer vision. We define a classification scheme describing visualization goals and methods as well as the application areas. This survey gives an overview of what can be learned from visualizing DNNs and which visualization methods were used to gain which insights. We found that most papers use Pixel Displays to show neuron activations. However, recently more sophisticated visualizations like interactive node-link diagrams were proposed. The presented overview can serve as a guideline when applying visualizations while designing DNNs.