Start a neuronal network project
Question: after a long term of reading the theory behind neural networks I finally want
to stark to do my own project in object recognition. However I struggle to
find a practical entry point. I want to use either C#,C++ or C however all new
tutorials seem to involve newer languages such as python.

For starting I would especially like to reprogram the theory concepts of Yann
LeCuns publications about object recognition.

Which programming language is recommended to use? And much more important:
Which framework do I use? There seem to be docents of frameworks (AForge,
Apache Mahout, OpenCV) and my theoretical knowledge seems to be too
impractical to differentiate the usage of these.

I want to program a simple independent neural network application which should
be easy trainable plus I don't want to reprogram classes such as neuron or
layer in order to focus on the architecture for the beginning.

Thanks and sorry for the simple probably often ask question, however I just
couldn't find anything matching.

Greetings Nex


Answer: disclosure: i'm not an expert.

depends on what exactly you want to do.

  * if you want to build something from scratch, probably the easiest language to start prototyping is matlab/octave because it's high level and offers pretty fast matrix manipulations, nice math support (like numeric derivatives) and robust plotting to quickly verify your models. when you have your prototype, you can port to to c/c++ to make it faster, more space efficient, portable etc.

  * if you want to just use exiting tools/techniques and just play with parameters (preprocessing, feature selection etc) to find the best model for you, i would recommend start from R and caret package or python (don't remember the package name)

  * if you want to use NN in cluster on big data then i would try using existing frameworks like openCV (not sure if mahout provides NN)

