In this work, we propose the combined usage of low- and high-level blocks of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for improving object recognition. While recent research focused on either propagating the context from all layers, e.g. ResNet, (including the very low-level layers) or having multiple loss layers (e.g. GoogLeNet), the importance of the features close to the higher layers is ignored. This paper postulates that the use of context closer to the high-level layers provides the scale and translation invariance and works better than using the top layer only. In particular, we extend AlexNet and GoogLeNet by additional connections in the top n layers. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we evaluated it on the standard ImageNet task. The relative reduction of the classification error is around 1-2 without affecting the computational cost. Furthermore, we show that this approach is orthogonal to typical test data augmentation techniques, as recently introduced by (leading to a runtime reduction of 144 during test time).
 Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. We present a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly reformulate the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. On the ImageNet dataset we evaluate residual nets with a depth of up to 152 layers—8× deeper than VGG nets [40] but still having lower complexity. An ensemble of these residual nets achieves 3.57 error on the ImageNet test set. This result won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task. We also present analysis on CIFAR-10 with 100 and 1000 layers. The depth of representations is of central importance for many visual recognition tasks. Solely due to our extremely deep representations, we obtain a 28 relative improvement on the COCO object detection dataset. Deep residual nets are foundations of our submissions to ILSVRC & COCO 2015 competitions1, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation. This paper presents a novel, highly-adaptable Java framework N-light-N, for the work with deep neural networks, especially with CAEs. While the most popular deep learning libraries focus on fast processing and high performance, they only implement the main-stream network architectures and network units. In recent research in the document domain, however, we have shown that modified networks, units, and training processes significantly improve the performance in various tasks. To enable the document research community with such capabilities, in this paper we introduce a novel, publicly available Deep Learning framework which is easy to use, adapt, and extend. Furthermore, we present successful applications for three tasks, including two in the domain of handwritten historical documents, and show how the framework can be used for adaptation, optimization, and deeper analysis.