In recent years, deep neural networks have achieved great success in the field of computer vision. However, it is still a big challenge to deploy these deep models on resource-constrained embedded devices such as mobile robots, smart phones and so on. Therefore, network compression for such platforms is a reasonable solution to reduce memory consumption and computation complexity. In this paper, a novel channel pruning method based on genetic algorithm is proposed to compress very deep Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs). Firstly, a pre-trained CNN model is pruned layer by layer according to the sensitivity of each layer. After that, the pruned model is fine-tuned based on knowledge distillation framework. These two improvements significantly decrease the model redundancy with less accuracy drop. Channel selection is a combinatorial optimization problem that has exponential solution space. In order to accelerate the selection process, the proposed method formulates it as a search problem, which can be solved efficiently by genetic algorithm. Meanwhile, a two-step approximation fitness function is designed to further improve the efficiency of genetic process. The proposed method has been verified on three benchmark datasets with two popular CNN models: VGGNet and ResNet. On the CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets, our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. On the CIFAR-10 and SVHN datasets, the pruned VGGNet achieves better performance than the original model with 8 times parameters compression and 3 times FLOPs reduction.
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