  We present QuickNet, a fast and accurate network architecture that is both
faster and significantly more accurate than other fast deep architectures like
SqueezeNet. Furthermore, it uses less parameters than previous networks, making
it more memory efficient. We do this by making two major modifications to the
reference Darknet model (Redmon et al, 2015): 1) The use of depthwise separable
convolutions and 2) The use of parametric rectified linear units. We make the
observation that parametric rectified linear units are computationally
equivalent to leaky rectified linear units at test time and the observation
that separable convolutions can be interpreted as a compressed Inception
network (Chollet, 2016). Using these observations, we derive a network
architecture, which we call QuickNet, that is both faster and more accurate
than previous models. Our architecture provides at least four major advantages:
(1) A smaller model size, which is more tenable on memory constrained systems;
(2) A significantly faster network which is more tenable on computationally
constrained systems; (3) A high accuracy of 95.7 percent on the CIFAR-10
Dataset which outperforms all but one result published so far, although we note
that our works are orthogonal approaches and can be combined (4) Orthogonality
to previous model compression approaches allowing for further speed gains to be
realized.
