Visual Detector Compression via Location-Aware Discriminant Analysis

Deep neural networks are powerful, yet their high complexity greatly limits their potential to be deployed on billions of resource-constrained edge devices. Pruning is a crucial network compression technique, yet most existing methods focus on classification models, with limited attention to detection. Even among those addressing detection, there is a lack of utilization of essential localization information. Also, many pruning methods passively rely on pre-trained models, in which useful and useless components are intertwined, making it difficult to remove the latter without harming the former at the neuron/filter level. To address the above issues, in this paper, we propose a proactive detection-discriminants-based network compression approach for deep visual detectors, which alternates between two steps: (1) maximizing and compressing detection-related discriminants and aligning them with a subset of neurons/filters immediately before the detection head, and (2) tracing the detection-related discriminating power across the layers and discarding features of lower importance. Object location information is exploited in both steps. Extensive experiments, employing four advanced detection models and four state-of-the-art competing methods on the KITTI and COCO datasets, highlight the superiority of our approach. Remarkably, our compressed models can even beat the original base models with a substantial reduction in complexity.