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19981990s
Why It Was Important
Yann LeCun's LeNet-5 architecture successfully recognized handwritten digits on bank checks and postal envelopes. Reading millions of checks daily, it was one of the first commercially successful applications of deep neural networks, proving CNNs worked flawlessly in the real world when enough labeled data was available.
Who Invented It
Yann LeCun
French computer scientist working at AT&T Bell Labs.
Applications
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
- Check Reading
- Digit Recognition
Key Papers
- Gradient-Based Learning Applied to Document Recognition
Yann LeCun et al. · Proceedings of the IEEE · 1998