Intra-layer Nonuniform Quantization for Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract: Deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) has achieved remarkable performance on object detection and speech recognition in recent years. However, the excellent performance of a DCNN incurs high computational complexity and large memory requirement. In this paper, an equal distance nonuniform quantization (ENQ) scheme and a K-means clustering nonuniform quantization (KNQ) scheme are proposed to reduce the required memory storage when low complexity hardware or software implementations are considered. For the VGG-16 and the AlexNet, the proposed nonuniform quantization schemes reduce the number of required memory storage by approximately 50\% while achieving almost the same or even better classification accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art quantization method. Compared to the ENQ scheme, the proposed KNQ scheme provides a better tradeoff when higher accuracy is required.