Recent research on Convolutional Neural Networks focuses on how to create models with a reduced number of parameters and a smaller storage size while keeping the model’s ability to perform its task, allowing the use of the best CNN for automating tasks in limited devices, with reduced processing power, memory, or energy consumption constraints. There are many different approaches in the literature: removing parameters, reduction of the floating-point precision, creating smaller models that mimic larger models, neural architecture search (NAS), etc. With all those possibilities, it is challenging to say which approach provides a better trade-off between model reduction and performance, due to the difference between the approaches, their respective models, the benchmark datasets, or variations in training details. Therefore, this article contributes to the literature by comparing three state-of-the-art model compression approaches to reduce a well-known convolutional approach for object detection, namely YOLOv3. Our experimental analysis shows that it is possible to create a reduced version of YOLOv3 with 90% fewer parameters and still outperform the original model by pruning parameters. We also create models that require only 0.43% of the original model’s inference effort.
An Experimental Analysis of Model Compression Techniques for Object Detection
