The Case for High-Accuracy Classification: Think Small, Think Many!
This addresses the need for efficient deep learning on devices with limited resources, though it is incremental as it builds on existing ensemble and feature methods.
The paper tackled the problem of high-accuracy image classification with low false positives on resource-constrained devices by proposing an efficient lightweight ensemble structure based on simple color features, achieving 7.64x faster inference and improved accuracy compared to ResNet-50 in explosion detection.
To facilitate implementation of high-accuracy deep neural networks especially on resource-constrained devices, maintaining low computation requirements is crucial. Using very deep models for classification purposes not only decreases the neural network training speed and increases the inference time, but also need more data for higher prediction accuracy and to mitigate false positives. In this paper, we propose an efficient and lightweight deep classification ensemble structure based on a combination of simple color features, which is particularly designed for "high-accuracy" image classifications with low false positives. We designed, implemented, and evaluated our approach for explosion detection use-case applied to images and videos. Our evaluation results based on a large test test show considerable improvements on the prediction accuracy compared to the popular ResNet-50 model, while benefiting from 7.64x faster inference and lower computation cost. While we applied our approach to explosion detection, our approach is general and can be applied to other similar classification use cases as well. Given the insight gained from our experiments, we hence propose a "think small, think many" philosophy in classification scenarios: that transforming a single, large, monolithic deep model into a verification-based step model ensemble of multiple small, simple, lightweight models with narrowed-down color spaces can possibly lead to predictions with higher accuracy.