  Object detection is a major challenge in computer vision, involving both
object classification and object localization within a scene. While deep neural
networks have been shown in recent years to yield very powerful techniques for
tackling the challenge of object detection, one of the biggest challenges with
enabling such object detection networks for widespread deployment on embedded
devices is high computational and memory requirements. Recently, there has been
an increasing focus in exploring small deep neural network architectures for
object detection that are more suitable for embedded devices, such as Tiny YOLO
and SqueezeDet. Inspired by the efficiency of the Fire microarchitecture
introduced in SqueezeNet and the object detection performance of the
single-shot detection macroarchitecture introduced in SSD, this paper
introduces Tiny SSD, a single-shot detection deep convolutional neural network
for real-time embedded object detection that is composed of a highly optimized,
non-uniform Fire sub-network stack and a non-uniform sub-network stack of
highly optimized SSD-based auxiliary convolutional feature layers designed
specifically to minimize model size while maintaining object detection
performance. The resulting Tiny SSD possess a model size of 2.3MB (~26X smaller
than Tiny YOLO) while still achieving an mAP of 61.3% on VOC 2007 (~4.2% higher
than Tiny YOLO). These experimental results show that very small deep neural
network architectures can be designed for real-time object detection that are
well-suited for embedded scenarios.
