Why do we scale down images before feeding them to the network? I have been seeing a lot where images are generally scaled down to either $64\times64$, $32\times32$ or other lower resolutions. Can someone please help me with this and answer a few questions:


Don't we lose image details by doing so?
What would be the consequences if we scale down the image to some other higher resolution such as $512\times512$ or $1024\times1024$ or something?
Can we feed the network without $1:1$ square images?
Because it saves lots of computation time. Yes, we do loose image details, but it depends on your task whether the details are really important. Let's say your task is to detect and count the total number of circles in an image, So you are only concerned with the shape circle, not its dimension. Hence, reducing image resolution a bit would be more computationally efficient.