Image Classification: Background Image classification is a widely used type of machine learning with numerous practical applications ranging from face recognition (security) to medical image analysis (diagnostic) to wildlife monitoring (conservation). Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are frequently used for image classification, in part because of the easy-to-use and well-supported TensorFlow and PyTorch python packages. Additionally CNNs require very little data pre-processing (feature extraction is automated), making them an ideal choice for image classification problems.