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Revisiting knowledge distillation for light-weight visual object detection

An essential element for intelligent perception in mechatronic and robotic systems (M&RS) is the visual object detection algorithm. With the ever-increasing advance of artificial neural networks (ANN), researchers have proposed numerous ANN-based visual object detection methods that have proven to be effective. However, networks with cumbersome structures do not befit the real-time scenarios in M&RS, necessitating the techniques of model compression. In the paper, a novel approach to training light-weight visual object detection networks is developed by revisiting knowledge distillation. Traditional knowledge distillation methods are oriented towards image classification is not compatible with object detection. Therefore, a variant of knowledge distillation is developed and adapted to a state-of-the-art keypoint-based visual detection method. Two strategies named as positive sample retaining and early distribution softening are employed to yield a natural adaption. The mutual consistency between teacher model and student model is further promoted through a hint-based distillation. By extensive controlled experiments, the proposed method is testified to be effective in enhancing the light-weight network’s performance by a large margin.