A compression pipeline for one-stage object detection model

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have strong fitting ability on a variety of computer vision tasks, but they also require intensive computing power and large storage space, which are not always available in portable smart devices. Although a lot of studies have contributed to the compression of image classification networks, there are few model compression algorithms for object detection models. In this paper, we propose a general compression pipeline for one-stage object detection networks to meet the real-time requirements. Firstly, we propose a softer pruning strategy on the backbone to reduce the number of filters. Compared with original direct pruning, our method can maintain the integrity of network structure and reduce the drop of accuracy. Secondly, we transfer the knowledge of the original model to the small model by knowledge distillation to reduce the accuracy drop caused by pruning. Finally, as edge devices are more suitable for integer operations, we further transform the 32-bit floating point model into the 8-bit integer model through quantization. With this pipeline, the model size and inference time are compressed to 10% or less of the original, while the mAP is only reduced by 2.5% or less. We verified that performance of the compression pipeline on the Pascal VOC dataset.