Patent attributes
An information processor is provided that includes an inference module configured to extract a subset of data from information in an input and a classification module configured to classify the information in the input based on the extracted data. The inference module includes a first plurality of convolvers acting in parallel to apply each of N1 convolution kernels to each of N2 portions of the input image in order to generate an interim sparse representation of the input and a second plurality of convolvers acting in parallel to apply each of N3 convolution kernels to each of N4 portions of the interim sparse representation to generate a final sparse representation containing the extracted data. In order to take advantage of sparsity in the interim sparse representation, N3 is greater than N4 to parallelize processing in a non-sparse dimension and/or the second plurality of convolvers comprise sparse convolvers.