Shallow SqueezeNext: An Efficient & Shallow DNN

Abstract

CNN has gained great success in many applications but the major design hurdles for deploying CNN on driver assistance systems or ADAS are limited computation, memory resource, and power budget. Recently, there has been greater exploration into small DNN architectures, such as SqueezeNet and SqueezeNext architectures. In this paper, the proposed Shallow SqueezeNext architecture for driver assistance systems achieves better model size with a good model accuracy and speed in comparison to baseline SqueezeNet and SqueezeNext architectures. The proposed architecture is compact, efficient and flexible in terms of model size and accuracy with minimum tradeoffs and less penalty. The proposed Shallow SqueezeNext uses SqueezeNext architecture as its motivation and foundation. The proposed architecture is developed with intention for implementation or deployment on a real-time autonomous system platform and to keep the model size less than 5 MB. Due to its extremely small model size, 0.370 MB with a competitive model accuracy of 82.44 %, decent both training and testing model speed of 7 seconds, it can be successfully deployed on ADAS, driver assistance systems or a real time autonomous system platform such as BlueBox2.0 by NXP. The proposed Shallow SqueezeNext architecture is trained and tested from scratch on CIFAR-10 dataset for developing a dataset specific trained model.