Fast-COS: A Fast One-Stage Object Detector Based on Reparameterized Attention Vision Transformer for Autonomous Driving

The perception system is a a critical role of an autonomous driving system for ensuring safety. The driving scene perception system fundamentally represents an object detection task that requires achieving a balance between accuracy and processing speed. Many contemporary methods focus on improving detection accuracy but often overlook the importance of real-time detection capabilities when computational resources are limited. Thus, it is vital to investigate efficient object detection strategies for driving scenes. This paper introduces Fast-COS, a novel single-stage object detection framework crafted specifically for driving scene applications. The research initiates with an analysis of the backbone, considering both macro and micro architectural designs, yielding the Reparameterized Attention Vision Transformer (RAViT). RAViT utilizes Reparameterized Multi-Scale Depth-Wise Convolution (RepMSDW) and Reparameterized Self-Attention (RepSA) to enhance computational efficiency and feature extraction. In extensive tests across GPU, edge, and mobile platforms, RAViT achieves 81.4% Top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet-1K dataset, demonstrating significant throughput improvements over comparable backbone models such as ResNet, FastViT, RepViT, and EfficientFormer. Additionally, integrating RepMSDW into a feature pyramid network forms RepFPN, enabling fast and multi-scale feature fusion. Fast-COS enhances object detection in driving scenes, attaining an AP50 score of 57.2% on the BDD100K dataset and 80.0% on the TJU-DHD Traffic dataset. It surpasses leading models in efficiency, delivering up to 75.9% faster GPU inference and 1.38 higher throughput on edge devices compared to FCOS, YOLOF, and RetinaNet. These findings establish Fast-COS as a highly scalable and reliable solution suitable for real-time applications, especially in resource-limited environments like autonomous driving systems

MicroViT: A Vision Transformer with Low Complexity Self Attention for Edge Device

The Vision Transformer (ViT) has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in various computer vision tasks, but its high computational demands make it impractical for edge devices with limited resources. This paper presents MicroViT, a lightweight Vision Transformer architecture optimized for edge devices by significantly reducing computational complexity while maintaining high accuracy. The core of MicroViT is the Efficient Single Head Attention (ESHA) mechanism, which utilizes group convolution to reduce feature redundancy and processes only a fraction of the channels, thus lowering the burden of the self-attention mechanism. MicroViT is designed using a multi-stage MetaFormer architecture, stacking multiple MicroViT encoders to enhance efficiency and performance. Comprehensive experiments on the ImageNet-1K and COCO datasets demonstrate that MicroViT achieves competitive accuracy while significantly improving 3.6 faster inference speed and reducing energy consumption with 40% higher efficiency than the MobileViT series, making it suitable for deployment in resource-constrained environments such as mobile and edge devices.

ParFormer: Vision Transformer Baseline with Parallel Local Global Token Mixer and Convolution Attention Patch Embedding

This work presents ParFormer as an enhanced transformer architecture that allows the incorporation of different token mixers into a single stage, hence improving feature extraction capabilities. Integrating both local and global data allows for precise representation of short- and long-range spatial relationships without the need for computationally intensive methods such as shifting windows. Along with the parallel token mixer encoder, We offer the Convolutional Attention Patch Embedding (CAPE) as an enhancement of standard patch embedding to improve token mixer extraction with a convolutional attention module. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that our ParFormer outperforms CNN-based and state-of-the-art transformer-based architectures in image classification and several complex tasks such as object recognition. The proposed CAPE has been demonstrated to benefit the overall MetaFormer architecture, even while utilizing the Identity Mapping Token Mixer, resulting in a 0.5\% increase in accuracy. The ParFormer models outperformed ConvNeXt and Swin Transformer for the pure convolution and transformer model in accuracy. Furthermore, our model surpasses the current leading hybrid transformer by reaching competitive Top-1 scores in the ImageNet-1K classification test. Specifically, our model variants with 11M, 23M, and 34M parameters achieve scores of 80.4\%, 82.1\%, and 83.1\%, respectively. Code: https://github.com/novendrastywn/ParFormer-CAPE-2024