Lightweight image classifier using dilated and depthwise separable convolutions

The image classification based on cloud computing suffers from difficult deployment as the network depth and data volume increase. Due to the depth of the model and the convolution process of each layer will produce a great amount of calculation, the GPU and storage performance of the device are extremely demanding, and the GPU and storage devices equipped on the embedded and mobile terminals cannot support large models. So it is necessary to compress the model so that the model can be deployed on these devices. Meanwhile, traditional compression based methods often miss many global features during the compression process, resulting in low classification accuracy. To solve the problem, this paper proposes a lightweight neural network model based on dilated convolution and depthwise separable convolution with twenty-nine layers for image classification. The proposed model employs the dilated convolution to expand the receptive field during the convolution process while maintaining the number of convolution parameters, which can extract more high-level global semantic features to improve the classification accuracy. Also, the depthwise separable convolution is applied to reduce the network parameters and computational complexity in convolution operations, which reduces the size of the network. The proposed model introduces three hyperparameters: width multiplier, image resolution, and dilated rate, to compress the network on the premise of ensuring accuracy. The experimental results show that compared with GoogleNet, the network proposed in this paper improves the classification accuracy by nearly 1%, and the number of parameters is reduced by 3.7 million.