Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have become the state-of-the-art (SOTA) approach for many computer vision tasks: image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, etc. However, most SOTA networks are too large for edge computing. Here, we suggest a simple way to reduce the number of trainable parameters and thus the memory footprint: sharing kernels between multiple convolutional layers. Kernel-sharing is only possible between ``isomorphic" layers, i.e.layers having the same kernel size, input and output channels. This is typically the case inside each stage of a DCNN. Our experiments on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, using the ConvMixer and SE-ResNet architectures show that the number of parameters of these models can drastically be reduced with minimal cost on accuracy. The resulting networks are appealing for certain edge computing applications that are subject to severe memory constraints, and even more interesting if leveraging "frozen weights" hardware accelerators. Kernel-sharing is also an efficient regularization method, which can reduce overfitting. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/AlirezaAzadbakht/kernel-sharing.

提出在深度卷积神经网络中通过共享卷积层核来减少可训练参数数量和内存占用的方法，既能够缓解边缘计算内存限制，又能有效地防止过拟合。实验证明该方法能够在保持精度的情况下大幅减少模型大小。

通过层间内核共享大幅减少深度卷积神经网络中可训练参数数量