Comment by amelius

10 years ago

What are directions for the future? Could neural networks become practically useful for video compression? [1]

[1] http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects...

5 comments

amelius

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jerf  10 years ago

Suppose I have a table of 8-digit numbers that I need to add and subtract for various reasons. Do I A: have a child, train them how to read numbers, add, and subtract, and then have the child do it or B: use a calculator purpose built to add and subtract numbers?

Neural nets are always expensive to train. You'd better be getting something from them that you can't get some other way.

  • gugagore  10 years ago

    Yes, you don't need the machinery of learning when you already have an algorithm you're happy with. Adding a table of numbers, I don't think anyone hopes to do much better than we already do with our circuits and computer architectures.

    With video compression, I think most would agree that there might be better architectures/algorithms that we haven't stumbled upon yet. Whether specifically "neural networks" will be the shape of a better architecture, I don't know. But almost surely some meta-algorithm that can try out tons of different parameters/data-pipeline-topologies for something that vaguely resembles h.264 might find something better than h.264.

    Neural nets are expensive to train. But so is designing h.264.