  Autonomous driving has harsh requirements of small model size and energy
efficiency, in order to enable the embedded system to achieve real-time
on-board object detection. Recent deep convolutional neural network based
object detectors have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy. However, such models
are trained with numerous parameters and their high computational costs and
large storage prohibit the deployment to memory and computation resource
limited systems. Low-precision neural networks are popular techniques for
reducing the computation requirements and memory footprint. Among them, binary
weight neural network (BWN) is the extreme case which quantizes the float-point
into just $1$ bit. BWNs are difficult to train and suffer from accuracy
deprecation due to the extreme low-bit representation. To address this problem,
we propose a knowledge transfer (KT) method to aid the training of BWN using a
full-precision teacher network. We built DarkNet- and MobileNet-based binary
weight YOLO-v2 detectors and conduct experiments on KITTI benchmark for car,
pedestrian and cyclist detection. The experimental results show that the
proposed method maintains high detection accuracy while reducing the model size
of DarkNet-YOLO from 257 MB to 8.8 MB and MobileNet-YOLO from 193 MB to 7.9 MB.
