Deep Residual Axial Networks

While residual networks (ResNets) demonstrate outstanding performance on computer vision tasks, their computational cost still remains high. Here, we focus on reducing this cost by proposing a new network architecture, axial ResNet, which replaces spatial 2D convolution operations with two consecutive 1D convolution operations. Convergence of very deep axial ResNets has faced degradation problems which prevent the networks from performing efficiently. To mitigate this, we apply a residual connection to each 1D convolutional operation and propose our final novel architecture namely residual axial networks (RANs). Extensive benchmark evaluation shows that RANs outperform with about 49% fewer parameters than ResNets on CIFAR benchmarks, SVHN, and Tiny ImageNet image classification datasets. Moreover, our proposed RANs show significant improvement in validation performance in comparison to the wide ResNets on CIFAR benchmarks and the deep recursive residual networks on image super-resolution dataset.