An Efficient Approach to Escalate the Speed of Training Convolution Neural Networks

Deep neural networks excel at image identification and computer vision applications such as visual product search, facial recognition, medical image analysis, object detection, semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and many others. In image and video recognition applications, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely employed. These networks provide better performance but at a higher cost of computation. With the advent of big data, the growing scale of datasets has made processing and model training a time-consuming operation, resulting in longer training times. Moreover, these large scale datasets contain redundant data points that have minimum impact on the final outcome of the model. To address these issues, an accelerated CNN system is proposed for speeding up training by eliminating the noncritical data points during training alongwith a model compression method. Furthermore, the identification of the critical input data is performed by aggregating the data points at two levels of granularity which are used for evaluating the impact on the model output. Extensive experiments are conducted using the proposed method on CIFAR-10 dataset on ResNet models giving a 40% reduction in number of FLOPs with a degradation of just 0.11% accuracy.