Feature Map Analysis-Based Dynamic CNN Pruning and the Acceleration on FPGAs
Qi Li, Hengyi Li, Lin Meng · Electronics · 2022
Deep-learning-based applications bring impressive results to graph machine learning and are widely used in fields such as autonomous driving and language translations. Nevertheless, the tremendous capacity of convolutional neural networks makes it difficult for them to be implemented on resource-constrained devices. Channel pruning provides a promising solution to compress networks by removing a redundant calculation. Existing pruning methods measure the importance of each filter and discard the less important ones until reaching a fixed compression target. However, the static approach limits the pruning effect. Thus, we propose a dynamic channel-pruning method that dynamically identifies and removes less important filters based on a redundancy analysis of its feature maps. Experimental results show that 77.10% of floating-point operations per second (FLOPs) and 91.72% of the parameters are reduced on VGG16BN with only a 0.54% accuracy drop. Furthermore, the compressed models were implemented on the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and a significant speed-up was observed.