CSL-YOLO: A Cross-Stage Lightweight Object Detector with Low FLOPs

Abstract

The development of lightweight object detectors is essential due to the limited computation resources. To reduce the computation cost, how to generate features plays a significant role. This paper proposes a new lightweight convolution method Cross-Stage Lightweight Module (CSL-M). It combines the Inverted Residual Block (IRB) and Cross-Stage Partial (CSP) concept. Experiments conducted at CIFAR-10 show that the proposed CSL-Net based on CSL-M performs better with fewer FLOPs than the other lightweight backbones. Finally, we use CSL-Net as the backbone to construct a lightweight detector CSL-YOLO, achieving better detection performance with only 43% FLOPs and 52% parameters than Tiny-YOLOv4.