학술논문

WATT-EffNet: A Lightweight and Accurate Model for Classifying Aerial Disaster Images
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters IEEE Geosci. Remote Sensing Lett. Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, IEEE. 20:1-5 2023
Subject
Geoscience
Power, Energy and Industry Applications
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Computing and Processing
Signal Processing and Analysis
Training
Computer architecture
Computational efficiency
Computational modeling
Autonomous aerial vehicles
Deep learning
Neural networks
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs)
disaster scene classification
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
Wider ATTENTION EfficientNet (WATT-EffNet)
Language
ISSN
1545-598X
1558-0571
Abstract
Incorporating deep-learning (DL) classification models into unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can significantly augment search-and-rescue operations and disaster management efforts. In such critical situations, the UAV’s ability to promptly comprehend the crisis and optimally utilize its limited power and processing resources to narrow down search areas is crucial. Therefore, developing an efficient and lightweight method for scene classification is of utmost importance. However, current approaches tend to prioritize accuracy on benchmark datasets at the expense of computational efficiency. To address this shortcoming, we introduce the Wider ATTENTION EfficientNet (WATT-EffNet), a novel method that achieves higher accuracy with a more lightweight architecture compared to the baseline EfficientNet. The WATT-EffNet leverages width-wise incremental feature modules and attention mechanisms over width-wise features to ensure the network structure remains lightweight. We evaluate our method on a UAV-based aerial disaster image classification dataset and demonstrate that it outperforms the baseline by up to 10.6% in terms of classification accuracy and 38.3% in terms of computing efficiency as measured by floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). Additionally, we conduct an ablation study to investigate the effect of varying the width of WATT-EffNet on accuracy and computational efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/TanmDL/WATT-EffNet.