It might be an alternative for deep neural networks, but I doubt it will be an alternative for deep convolutional neural networks. The key breakthrough for deep

It might be an alternative for deep neural networks, but I doubt it will be an alternative for deep convolutional neural networks. The key breakthrough for deep learning was the stacking of many convolutional layers and being able to train those (key elements include SGD for large scale, dropout or batch norm, etc.). Perhaps if they build some convolutional features for the decision tree they will be able to achieve comparable results, but it will start to look a lot like a deep convolutional neural net (i.e., the same thing with a different name).