High-Performance Deployment of Text Detection Model: Compression and Hardware Platform considerations

Network compression is often adopted for high throughput implementation on commercial accelerators. We propose a heuristic based approach to obtain compressed networks with a hardware-friendly architecture as an alternative to conventional NAS algorithms that are computationally expensive. The proposed compressed network introduces 142 $\times$ memory-footprint reduction and provide throughput improvement of 5-8 $\times$ on target hardware platforms, while retaining accuracy within 5% of the baseline trained model. We report performance acceleration on CPU, GPU, and FPGAs for a text detection task.