ICNN: The Iterative Convolutional Neural Network

Modern and recent architectures of vision-based Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have improved detection and prediction accuracy significantly. However, these algorithms are extremely computationally intensive. To break the power and performance wall of CNN computation, we reformulate the CNN computation into an iterative process, where each iteration processes a sub-sample of input features with smaller network and ingests additional features to improve the prediction accuracy. Each smaller network could either classify based on its input set or feed computed and extracted features to the next network to enhance the accuracy. The proposed approach allows early-termination upon reaching acceptable confidence. Moreover, each iteration provides a contextual awareness that allows an intelligent resource allocation and optimization for the proceeding iterations. In this article, we propose various policies to reduce the computational complexity of CNN through the proposed iterative approach. We illustrate how the proposed policies construct a dynamic architecture suitable for a wide range of applications with varied accuracy requirements, resources, and time-budget, without further need for network re-training. Furthermore, we carry out a visualization of the detected features in each iteration through deconvolution network to gain more insight into the successive traversal of the ICNN.