Optimized pointwise convolution operation by Ghost blocks

Abstract

In the lightweight convolutional neural network model, the pointwise convolutional structure occupies most of the parameters and computation amount of the model. Therefore, improving the pointwise convolution structure is the best choice to optimize the lightweight model. Aiming at the problem that the pointwise convolution in MobileNetV1 and MobileNetV2 consumes too many computation resources, we designed the novel Ghost-PE and Ghost-PC blocks. First, in order to optimize the channel expanded pointwise convolution with the number of input channels less than the output, Ghost-PE makes full use of the feature maps generated by main convolution of the Ghost module, and adds global average pooling and depth convolution operation to enhance the information of feature maps generated through cheap convolution. Second, in order to optimize the channel compressed pointwise convolution with the number of input channels more than the output, Ghost-PC adjusts the Ghost-PE block to make full use of the features generated by cheap convolution to enhance the feature channel information. Finally, we optimized MobileNetV1 and MobileNetV2 models by Ghost-PC and Ghost-PE blocks, and then tested on Food-101, CIFAR and Mini-ImageNet datasets. Compared with other methods, the experimental results show that Ghost-PE and Ghost-PC still maintain a relatively high accuracy in the case of a small number of parameters.

Keywords

• pointwise convolution
• ghost blocks
• ghost-pe
• ghost-pc
• mobilenet