  We classify digits of real-world house numbers using convolutional neural
networks (ConvNets). ConvNets are hierarchical feature learning neural networks
whose structure is biologically inspired. Unlike many popular vision approaches
that are hand-designed, ConvNets can automatically learn a unique set of
features optimized for a given task. We augmented the traditional ConvNet
architecture by learning multi-stage features and by using Lp pooling and
establish a new state-of-the-art of 94.85% accuracy on the SVHN dataset (45.2%
error improvement). Furthermore, we analyze the benefits of different pooling
methods and multi-stage features in ConvNets. The source code and a tutorial
are available at eblearn.sf.net.
