Research on Network Layer Recursive Reduction Model Compression for Image Recognition

ResNet has been widely used in the field of machine learning since it was proposed. This network model is successful in extracting features from input data by superimposing multiple layers of neural networks and thus achieves high accuracy in many applications. However, the superposition of multilayer neural networks increases their computational cost. For this reason, we propose a network model compression technique that removes multiple neural network layers from ResNet without decreasing the accuracy rate. The key idea is to provide a priority term to identify the importance of each neural network layer, and then select the unimportant layers to be removed during the training process based on the priority of the neural network layers. In addition, this paper also retrains the network model to avoid the accuracy degradation caused by the deletion of network layers. Experiments demonstrate that the network size can be reduced by 24.00%–42.86% of the number of layers without reducing the classification accuracy when classification is performed on CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet.