Convolutional neural networks model compression based on feature selection for image classification
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) feature extractor (CNN-FE) has been widely applied in many applications and achieved great success. However, evaluating shows that the CNN-FE holds abundant parameters which largely limits its applications on memory-limited platforms, such as smartphones. This study makes an effort to trim the well-known CNN-FEs, AlexNet, to reduce its parameters meanwhile the image classification performance almost remains unchanged. This task is considered as a CNN-FE model compression problem. Through carefully analyzing the parameter distribution of AlexNet, we find about 99%of parameters are in its fully connected layer but the deep features are redundant for image classification tasks with small number of categories. Moreover, we propose to convert the CNN-FE model compression problem into a feature selection problem. Specifically, a feature selection method, which is based on mutual information and a novel criterion related to the classification accuracy and the compression ratio, has been proposed. Image classification experiments on a public scene categories database and our self-built wireless capsule endoscope (WCE) bubble dataset show that our proposed CNN-FE model compression method reduces more than 83%size of the AlexNet while almost maintaining the classification accuracy.