Lightweight network learning with Zero-Shot Neural Architecture Search for UAV images

Lightweight Network Architecture is essential for autonomous and intelligent monitoring of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), such as in object detection, image segmentation, and crowd counting applications. The state-of-the-art lightweight network learning based on Neural Architecture Search (NAS) usually costs enormous computation resources. Alternatively, low-performance embedded platforms and high-resolution drone images pose a challenge for lightweight network learning. To alleviate this problem, this paper proposes a new lightweight object detection model, called GhostShuffleNet (GSNet), for UAV images, which is built based on Zero-Shot Neural Architecture Search. This paper also introduces the new components which compose GSNet, namely GhostShuffle units (loosely based on ShuffleNetV2) and the backbone GSmodel-L. Firstly, a lightweight search space is constructed with the GhostShuffle (GS) units to reduce the parameters and floating-point operations (FLOPs). Secondly, the parameters, FLOPs, layers, and memory access cost (MAC) as constraints add to search strategy on a Zero-Shot Neural structure search algorithm, which then searches for an optimal network GSmodel-L. Finally, the optimal GSmodel-L is used as the backbone network and a Ghost-PAN feature fusion module and detection heads are added to complete the design of the lightweight object detection network (GSNet). Extensive experiments are conducted on the VisDrone2019 (14.92%mAP) dataset and the our UAV-OUC-DET (8.38%mAP) dataset demonstrating the efficiency and effectiveness of GSNet. The completed code is available at: https://github.com/yfq-yy/GSNet. •Design a new lightweight search space, named GS unit.•Constraints are added on parameters, FLOPs, layers, and MAC to search lighter models.•Construct a new lightweight object detection network, named GSNet.