Intra-layer nonuniform quantization of convolutional neural network

Abstract

Deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) has achieved remarkable performance on object detection and speech recognition in recent years. However, the excellent performance of a DCNN incurs high computational complexity and large memory requirement In this paper, an equal distance nonuniform quantization (ENQ) scheme and a K-means clustering nonuniform quantization (KNQ) scheme are proposed to reduce the required memory storage when low complexity hardware or software implementations are considered. For the VGG-16 and the AlexNet, the proposed nonuniform quantization schemes reduce the number of required memory storage by approximately 50% while achieving almost the same or even better classification accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art quantization method. Compared to the ENQ scheme, the proposed KNQ scheme provides a better tradeoff when higher accuracy is required.