Transfer Learning and Data — How Vision Actually Gets Built
Almost nobody trains a computer-vision model from scratch — and if you're trying to, you're probably doing it wrong. The real practice of vision is transfer learning: take a model pretrained on millions of images, adapt it to your task with a fraction of the data. This, plus smart data strategy, is how vision gets built in the real world, and it's the single most practical thing to understand about applying computer vision. This post is about how it's actually done.
Almost nobody trains vision models from scratch — the real practice is transfer learning: adapt a pretrained model with a fraction of the data. Feature extraction vs fine-tuning (chosen by data size), and the data realities (labeling cost, representativeness, augmentation) that actually decide a vision project.