Fast ConvNets Using Group-wise Brain Damage

We revisit the idea of brain damage, i.e. the pruning of the coefficients of a neural network, and suggest how brain damage can be modified and used to speedup convolutional layers. The approach uses the fact that many efficient implementations reduce generalized convolutions to matrix multiplications. The suggested brain damage process prunes the convolutional kernel tensor in a group-wise fashion by adding group-sparsity regularization to the standard training process. After such group-wise pruning, convolutions can be reduced to multiplications of thinned dense matrices, which leads to speedup. In the comparison on AlexNet, the method achieves very competitive performance

Towards lightweight convolutional neural networks for object detection

We propose model with larger spatial size of feature maps and evaluate it on object detection task. With the goal to choose the best feature extraction network for our model we compare several popular lightweight networks. After that we conduct a set of experiments with channels reduction algorithms in order to accelerate execution. Our vehicle detection models are accurate, fast and therefore suit for embedded visual applications. With only 1.5 GFLOPs our best model gives 93.39 AP on validation subset of challenging DETRAC dataset. The smallest of our models is the first to achieve real-time inference speed on CPU with reasonable accuracy drop to 91.43 AP.Comment: Submitted to the International Workshop on Traffic and Street Surveillance for Safety and Security (IWT4S) in conjunction with the 14th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Video and Signal based Surveillance (AVSS 2017

Reduced Memory Region Based Deep Convolutional Neural Network Detection

Accurate pedestrian detection has a primary role in automotive safety: for example, by issuing warnings to the driver or acting actively on car's brakes, it helps decreasing the probability of injuries and human fatalities. In order to achieve very high accuracy, recent pedestrian detectors have been based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Unfortunately, such approaches require vast amounts of computational power and memory, preventing efficient implementations on embedded systems. This work proposes a CNN-based detector, adapting a general-purpose convolutional network to the task at hand. By thoroughly analyzing and optimizing each step of the detection pipeline, we develop an architecture that outperforms methods based on traditional image features and achieves an accuracy close to the state-of-the-art while having low computational complexity. Furthermore, the model is compressed in order to fit the tight constrains of low power devices with a limited amount of embedded memory available. This paper makes two main contributions: (1) it proves that a region based deep neural network can be finely tuned to achieve adequate accuracy for pedestrian detection (2) it achieves a very low memory usage without reducing detection accuracy on the Caltech Pedestrian dataset.Comment: IEEE 2016 ICCE-Berli