ESPNetv2: A Light-weight, Power Efficient, and General Purpose Convolutional Neural Network

We introduce a light-weight, power efficient, and general purpose convolutional neural network, ESPNetv2, for modeling visual and sequential data. Our network uses group point-wise and depth-wise dilated separable convolutions to learn representations from a large effective receptive field with fewer FLOPs and parameters. The performance of our network is evaluated on four different tasks: (1) object classification, (2) semantic segmentation, (3) object detection, and (4) language modeling. Experiments on these tasks, including image classification on the ImageNet and language modeling on the PenTree bank dataset, demonstrate the superior performance of our method over the state-of-the-art methods. Our network outperforms ESPNet by 4-5% and has 2-4x fewer FLOPs on the PASCAL VOC and the Cityscapes dataset. Compared to YOLOv2 on the MS-COCO object detection, ESPNetv2 delivers 4.4% higher accuracy with 6x fewer FLOPs. Our experiments show that ESPNetv2 is much more power efficient than existing state-of-the-art efficient methods including ShuffleNets and MobileNets. Our code is open-source and available at https://github.com/sacmehta/ESPNetv2

PDF Abstract CVPR 2019 PDF CVPR 2019 Abstract
Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Semantic Segmentation Cityscapes test ESPNetv2 Mean IoU (class) 66.2% # 92
Object Detection COCO test-dev ESPNetv2-512 box mAP 26.0 # 231
Operations per network pass 0.28G # 1
Image Classification ImageNet ESPNetv2 Top 1 Accuracy 74.9% # 888
Number of params 5.9M # 429
GFLOPs 0.602 # 70
Semantic Segmentation PASCAL VOC 2012 test ESPNetv2 Mean IoU 68.0% # 41

Methods