SqueezeDet: Unified, Small, Low Power Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Real-Time Object Detection for Autonomous Driving

TL;DR

SqueezeDet is a fully convolutional neural network designed for real-time, energy-efficient object detection in autonomous driving, achieving high accuracy with significantly smaller size and faster inference than previous models.

Contribution

The paper introduces SqueezeDet, a novel fully convolutional network that combines small size, high speed, and accuracy for autonomous vehicle object detection.

Findings

30.4x smaller model size

19.7x faster inference speed

35.2x lower energy consumption

Abstract

Object detection is a crucial task for autonomous driving. In addition to requiring high accuracy to ensure safety, object detection for autonomous driving also requires real-time inference speed to guarantee prompt vehicle control, as well as small model size and energy efficiency to enable embedded system deployment. In this work, we propose SqueezeDet, a fully convolutional neural network for object detection that aims to simultaneously satisfy all of the above constraints. In our network, we use convolutional layers not only to extract feature maps but also as the output layer to compute bounding boxes and class probabilities. The detection pipeline of our model only contains a single forward pass of a neural network, thus it is extremely fast. Our model is fully-convolutional, which leads to a small model size and better energy efficiency. While achieving the same accuracy as previous baselines, our model is 30.4x smaller, 19.7x faster, and consumes 35.2x lower energy. The code is open-sourced at \url{https://github.com/BichenWuUCB/squeezeDet}.