A Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network with Hierarchical Multi-Scale Feature Fusion for Image Classification

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely used in image classification tasks, but their increasing model size and computation make them challenging to implement on embedded systems with constrained hardware resources. To address this issue, the MobileNetV1 network was developed, which employs depthwise convolution to reduce network complexity. MobileNetV1 employs a stride of 2 in several convolutional layers to decrease the spatial resolution of feature maps, thereby lowering computational costs. However, this stride setting can lead to a loss of spatial information, particularly affecting the detection and representation of smaller objects or finer details in images. To maintain the trade-off between complexity and model performance, a lightweight convolutional neural network with hierarchical multi-scale feature fusion based on the MobileNetV1 network is proposed. The network consists of two main subnetworks. The first subnetwork uses a depthwise dilated separable convolution (DDSC) layer to learn imaging features with fewer parameters, which results in a lightweight and computationally inexpensive network. Furthermore, depthwise dilated convolution in DDSC layer effectively expands the field of view of filters, allowing them to incorporate a larger context. The second subnetwork is a hierarchical multi-scale feature fusion (HMFF) module that uses parallel multi-resolution branches architecture to process the input feature map in order to extract the multi-scale feature information of the input image. Experimental results on the CIFAR-10, Malaria, and KvasirV1 datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient, reducing the network parameters and computational cost by 65.02% and 39.78%, respectively, while maintaining the network performance compared to the MobileNetV1 baseline.