  The learning capability of a neural network improves with increasing depth at
higher computational costs. Wider layers with dense kernel connectivity
patterns furhter increase this cost and may hinder real-time inference. We
propose feature map and kernel level pruning for reducing the computational
complexity of a deep convolutional neural network. Pruning feature maps reduces
the width of a layer and hence does not need any sparse representation.
Further, kernel pruning converts the dense connectivity pattern into a sparse
one. Due to coarse nature, these pruning granularities can be exploited by GPUs
and VLSI based implementations. We propose a simple and generic strategy to
choose the least adversarial pruning masks for both granularities. The pruned
networks are retrained which compensates the loss in accuracy. We obtain the
best pruning ratios when we prune a network with both granularities.
Experiments with the CIFAR-10 dataset show that more than 85% sparsity can be
induced in the convolution layers with less than 1% increase in the
missclassification rate of the baseline network.
