Recurrent Residual Module for Fast Inference in Videos

Bowen Pan, Wuwei Lin, Xiaolin Fang, Chaoqin Huang, Bolei Zhou, Cewu Lu; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018, pp. 1536-1545

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have made impressive progress in many video recognition tasks such as video pose estimation and video object detection. However, running CNN inference on video requires numerous computation and is usually slow. In this work, we propose a framework called Recurrent Residual Module (RRM) to accelerate the CNN inference for video recognition tasks. This framework has a novel design of using the similarity of the intermediate feature maps of two consecutive frames to largely reduce the redundant computation. One unique property of the proposed method compared to previous work is that feature maps of each frame are precisely computed. The experiments show that, while maintaining the similar recognition performance, our RRM yields averagely 2× acceleration on the commonly used CNNs such as AlexNet, ResNet, deep compression model (thus 8−12× faster than the original dense models on the efficient inference engine), and impressively 9× acceleration on some binary networks such as XNOR-Nets (thus 500× faster than the original model). We further verify the effectiveness of the RRM on speeding CNNs for video pose estimation and video object detection.