Towards Efficient U-Nets: A Coupled and Quantized Approach

In this paper, we propose to couple stacked U-Nets for efficient visual landmark localization. The key idea is to globally reuse features of the same semantic meanings across the stacked U-Nets. The feature reuse makes each U-Net light-weighted. Specially, we propose an order- K coupling design to trim off long-distance shortcuts, together with an iterative refinement and memory sharing mechanism. To further improve the efficiency, we quantize the parameters, intermediate features, and gradients of the coupled U-Nets to low bit-width numbers. We validate our approach in two tasks: human pose estimation and facial landmark localization. The results show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art localization accuracy but using  ∼ 70% fewer parameters,  ∼ 30% less inference time,  ∼ 98% less model size, and saving  ∼ 75% training memory compared with benchmark localizers.