Simplification of Deep Neural Network-Based Object Detector for Real-Time Edge Computing

This paper presents a method for simplifying and quantizing a deep neural network (DNN)-based object detector to embed it into a real-time edge device. For network simplification, this paper compares five methods for applying channel pruning to a residual block because special care must be taken regarding the number of channels when summing two feature maps. Based on the comparison in terms of detection performance, parameter number, computational complexity, and processing time, this paper discovers the most satisfying method on the edge device. For network quantization, this paper compares post-training quantization (PTQ) and quantization-aware training (QAT) using two datasets with different detection difficulties. This comparison shows that both approaches are recommended in the case of the easy-to-detect dataset, but QAT is preferable in the case of the difficult-to-detect dataset. Through experiments, this paper shows that the proposed method can effectively embed the DNN-based object detector into an edge device equipped with Qualcomm’s QCS605 System-on-Chip (SoC), while achieving a real-time operation with more than 10 frames per second.