AI engineering glossary · Computer vision
What is feature map?
Feature map (also called Activation map): The output grid produced when a filter is applied across an image or an earlier layer's output. Each value shows how strongly the filter's pattern appears at that location, and a layer with many filters produces a stack of feature maps.
Feature map: an example
A vertical-edge filter applied to a photo of a building gives a feature map with high values along window frames and low values on plain walls.
Related terms
More Computer vision terms
- Feature matching
- Feature pyramid network
- Fine-tuning
- Fully convolutional network
- Gaussian blur
- Global average pooling
- Grad-CAM
- Grayscale image
Where you learn it
Feature map is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.