A lightweight deep neural network with higher accuracy.

To improve accuracy of the MobileNet network, a new lightweight deep neural network is designed based on the MobileNetV2 network. Firstly, it modifies the network depth of MobileNetV2 to balance the image resolution, network width and depth to keep the gradient stable, which reduces the generation of gradient vanishing or gradient exploding. Secondly, it proposes an improved Bottleneck module by introducing channel attention mechanism. It assigns different weights for different channels according to the degree of relevance between the object features and channels. Therefore, the network can extract more effective features from a complex background. In the end, a new usage strategy of the improved Bottleneck is proposed. It uses the improved Bottleneck module in the second, fourth and fifth stages of MobileNetV2, and uses the original Bottleneck module in other states. Compared with MobileNetV2, MobileNetV3, ShuffleNetV2, GhostNet and HBONetmethods, the proposed method has the highest classification accuracy on the ImageNet-1K dataset, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. Compared with YOLOV4-Lite methods based on these lightweight network networks, YOLOV4-Lite based on our proposed network also has the highest detection accuracy on the PASCAL VOC07+12 dataset.