MiniNet: Dense squeeze with depthwise separable convolutions for image classification in resource-constrained autonomous systems

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been developed vigorously, and a great number of AI autonomous applications have been proposed. However, how to decrease computations and shorten training time with high accuracy under the limited hardware resource is a vital issue. In this paper, on the basis of MobileNet architecture, the dense squeeze with depthwise separable convolutions model is proposed, viz. MiniNet. MiniNet utilizes depthwise and pointwise convolutions, and is composed of the dense connection technique and the Squeeze-and-Excitation operations. The proposed MiniNet model is implemented and experimented with Keras. In experimental results, MiniNet is compared with three existing models, i.e., DenseNet, MobileNet, and SE-Inception-Resnet-v1. To validate that the proposed MiniNet model is provided with less computation and shorter training time, two types as well as large and small datasets are used. The experimental results showed that the proposed MiniNet model significantly reduces the number of parameters and shortens training time efficiently. MiniNet is superior to other models in terms of the lowest parameters, shortest training time, and highest accuracy when the dataset is small, especially.