TbsNet: the importance of thin-branch structures in CNNs

The performance of a convolutional neural network (CNN) model is influenced by several factors, such as depth, width, network structure, size of the receptive field, and feature map scaling. The optimization of the best combination of these factors poses as the main difficulty in designing a viable architecture. This article presents an analysis of key factors influencing network performance, offers several strategies for constructing an efficient convolutional network, and introduces a novel architecture named TbsNet (thin-branch structure network). In order to minimize computation costs and feature redundancy, lightweight operators such as asymmetric convolution, pointwise convolution, depthwise convolution, and group convolution are implemented to further reduce the network’s weight. Unlike previous studies, the TbsNet architecture design rejects the reparameterization method and adopts a plain, simplified structure which eliminates extraneous branches. We conduct extensive experiments, including network depth, width, etc. TbsNet performs well on benchmark platforms, Top 1 Accuracy on CIFAR-10 is 97.02%, on CIFAR-100 is 83.56%, and on ImageNet-1K is 86.17%. Tbs-UNet’s DSC on the Synapse dataset is 78.39%, higher than TransUNet’s 0.91%. TbsNet can be competent for some downstream tasks in computer vision, such as medical image segmentation, and thus is competitive with prior state-of-the-art deep networks such as ResNet, ResNeXt, RepVgg, ParNet, ConvNeXt, and MobileNet.