Neural networks are very much real-time. They generally consist of a fixed series of math operations of fixed size. Only the weights and inputs change.
The neural net will never be late. It just might be inaccurate.
Huh, I suppose they aren't inherently incompatible with real-time constraints. It looks like it's pretty challenging to do in practice though.
I'm still somewhat confused as to how multi-object recognition works in a real-time way, naively I'd presume that recognizing n+1 objects in a frame would take longer than n objects.
You might be able to more practically get real-time neural networks using something like YOLO (you only look once)?
Either way it seems to me like hard real-time neural networks are a very challenging problem.
The neural net will never be late. It just might be inaccurate.