Just to add to @ptrblck comments – coming from a university research perspective, although not in image/video processing.
Deep Learning is both data and resource-hungry. This is why on many top papers, at least one author is from a company like Microsoft, Facebook, etc. That means, being smart brings you in many cases only so far. AI is also a very crowded field and CVPR is extremely(!) difficult to get into. And the works that do come from very strong groups that have also the required resources.
I’m really not trying to question your capabilities, but you might want to bit more pragmatic with your goals. For example, the paper that @ptrblck links is from the Hinton group. And Hinton won the Turing Award for his work in Deep Learning.
By they way according to my image/video colleagues, a “cat vs. dog” classifier should do around 99% at least these days :).