YOLO sparse training and model pruning for street view house numbers recognition

Abstract

This paper proposes a YOLO (You Only Look Once) sparse training and model pruning technique for recognizing house numbers in street view images. YOLO is a popular object detection algorithm that has achieved state-of-the-art performance in various computer vision tasks. However, its large model size and computational complexity limit its deployment on resource-constrained devices such as smartphones and embedded systems. To address this issue, we use a sparse training technique that trains YOLO with L1 norm regularization to encourage the network to learn sparse representations. This results in a significant reduction in the number of parameters and computation without sacrificing accuracy. Furthermore, we apply a model pruning technique to the sparse-trained model to reduce the model size and computation. We evaluate our proposed method on the SVHN (Street View House Numbers) dataset. We show that it performs comparably to the original YOLO model while reducing the model size by 5% and the computation time by 7%. Overall, our proposed YOLO sparse training and model pruning technique provides an effective solution for deploying YOLO-based object detection models on resource-constrained devices.