2018/08/07 by Chun Fu Chen, Quanfu Fan, Chen, Chun-Fu +5
Computer Science · #Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques #Advanced Neural Network Applications #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1808.02167
openalex publication_date 2018/08/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We propose a new method to create compact convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by exploiting sparse convolutions. Different from previous works that learn sparsity in models, we directly employ hand-crafted kernels with regular sparse patterns, which result in the computational gain in practice without sophisticated and dedicated software or hardware. The core of our approach is an efficient network module that linearly combines sparse kernels to yield feature representations as strong as those from regular kernels. We integrate this module into various network architectures and demonstrate its effectiveness on three vision tasks, object classification, localization and detection. For object classification and localization, our approach achieves comparable or better performance than several baselines and related works while providing lower computational costs with fewer parameters (on average, a 2-4× reduction of convolutional parameters and computation). For object detection, our approach leads to a VGG-16-based Faster RCNN detector that is 12.4× smaller and about 3× faster than the baseline.