A survey of model compression strategies for object detection

Abstract

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved great success in many object detection tasks. However, such DNNS-based large object detection models are generally computationally expensive and memory intensive. It is difficult to deploy them to devices with low memory resources or scenarios with high real-time requirements, which greatly limits their application and promotion. In recent years, many researchers have focused on compressing large object detection models without significantly degrading their performance, and have made great progress. Therefore, this paper presents a survey of object detection model compression techniques in recent years. Firstly, these compression techniques were divided into six categories: network pruning, lightweight network design, neural architecture search (NAS), low-rank decomposition, network quantization, and Knowledge distillation (KD) methods. For each category, we select some representative state-of-the-art methods and compare and analyze their performance on public datasets. After that, we discuss the application scenarios and future directions of model compression techniques. Finally, this paper is further concluded by analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of six types of model compression techniques.