Shallow SqueezeNext: Real Time Deployment on Bluebox2.0 with 272KB Model Size

Abstract

The significant challenges for deploying CNNs/DNNs on ADAS are limited computation and memory resources with very limited efficiency. Design space exploration of CNNs or DNNS, training and testing DNN from scratch, hyper parameter tuning, implementation with different optimizers contributed towards the efficiency and performance improvement of the Shallow SqueezeNext architecture. It is also computationally efficient, inexpensive and requires minimum memory resources. It achieves better model size and speed in comparison to other counterparts such as AlexNet, VGGnet, SqueezeNet, and SqueezeNext, trained and tested from scratch on datasets such as CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. It can achieve the least model size of 272KB with a model accuracy of 82%, a model speed of 9 seconds per epoch, and tested on the CIFAR-10 dataset. It achieved the best accuracy of 91.41%, best model size of 0.272 MB, and best model speed of 4 seconds per epoch. Memory resources are of high importance when it comes down to real time system or platforms because usually the memory is quite limited. To verify that the Shallow SqueezeNext can be successfully deployed on a real time platform, bluebox2.0 by NXP was used. Bluebox2.0 deployment of Shallow SqueezeNext architecture achieved a model accuracy of 90.50%, 8.72MB model size and 22 seconds per epoch model speed. There is another version of the Shallow SqueezeNext which performed better that attained a model size of 0.5MB with model accuracy of 87.30% and 11 seconds per epoch model speed trained and tested from scratch on CIFAR-10 dataset.