Commonsense Knowledge Assisted Deep Learning for Resource-constrained and Fine-grained Object Detection

In this paper, we consider fine-grained image object detection in resource-constrained cases such as edge computing. Deep learning (DL), namely learning with deep neural networks (DNNs), has become the dominating approach to object detection. To achieve accurate fine-grained detection, one needs to employ a large enough DNN model and a vast amount of data annotations, which brings a challenge for using modern DL object detectors in resource-constrained cases. To this end, we propose an approach, which leverages commonsense knowledge to assist a coarse-grained object detector to get accurate fine-grained detection results. Specifically, we introduce a commonsense knowledge inference module (CKIM) to translate coarse-grained labels given by a backbone lightweight coarse-grained DL detector to fine-grained labels. We consider both crisp-rule and fuzzy-rule based inference in our CKIM; the latter is used to handle ambiguity in the target semantic labels. We implement our method based on several modern DL detectors, namely YOLOv4, Mobilenetv3-SSD and YOLOv7-tiny. Experiment results show that our approach outperforms benchmark detectors remarkably in terms of accuracy, model size and processing latency.