Neural Network Model Compression Algorithms for Image Classification in Embedded Systems

Abstract

This paper introduces model compression algorithms which make a deep neural network smaller and faster for embedded systems. The model compression algorithms can be largely categorized into pruning, quantization and knowledge distillation. In this study, gradual pruning, quantization aware training, and knowledge distillation which learns the activation boundary in the hidden layer of the teacher neural network are integrated. As a large deep neural network is compressed and accelerated by these algorithms, embedded computing boards can run the deep neural network much faster with less memory usage while preserving the reasonable accuracy. To evaluate the performance of the compressed neural networks, we evaluate the size, latency and accuracy of the deep neural network, DenseNet201, for image classification with CIFAR-10 dataset on the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier.