# Visual Saliency-Guided Channel Pruning for Deep Visual Detectors in Autonomous Driving Source: [Visual Saliency-Guided Channel Pruning for Deep Visual Detectors in Autonomous Driving]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T01:04:50.062Z Authors: Jung Im Choi, Qing Tian Published: 2023-03-04T22:08:22.000Z ## Abstract Deep neural network (DNN) pruning has become a de facto component for deploying on resource-constrained devices since it can reduce memory requirements and computation costs during inference. In particular, channel pruning gained more popularity due to its structured nature and direct savings on general hardware. However, most existing pruning approaches utilize importance measures that are not directly related to the task utility. Moreover, few in the literature focus on visual detection models. To fill these gaps, we propose a novel gradient-based saliency measure for visual detection and use it to guide our channel pruning. Experiments on the KITTI and COCO traffic datasets demonstrate our pruning method's efficacy and superiority over state-of-the-art competing approaches. It can even achieve better performance with fewer parameters than the original model. Our pruning also demonstrates great potential in handling small-scale objects. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()