Processes and systems are disclosed. The processes and systems are arranged to apply convolution for a CNN where the CNN is simplified using sparse techniques, quantization techniques or both sparse and quantization techniques. A location vector (LV) table is provided to record the coordinates of non-zero weights. A look up table is provided to recover the real weight value from the weight identification. Convolution is applied by retrieving the coordinates of the next non-zero weight and the associated real weight value and by accumulating the multiplication of the real weight value and the input value across the input activation plane.