# SBCFormer: Lightweight Network Capable of Full-size ImageNet Classification at 1 FPS on Single Board Computers

Source: [SBCFormer: Lightweight Network Capable of Full-size ImageNet Classification at 1 FPS on Single Board Computers](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa71a91e209131cea52660>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-26T02:10:33.419Z

Authors: Xiangyong Lu, Masanori Suganuma, Takayuki Okatani

Published: 2023-11-07T06:09:56.000Z

## Abstract

Computer vision has become increasingly prevalent in solving real-world problems across diverse domains, including smart agriculture, fishery, and livestock management. These applications may not require processing many image frames per second, leading practitioners to use single board computers (SBCs). Although many lightweight networks have been developed for mobile/edge devices, they primarily target smartphones with more powerful processors and not SBCs with the low-end CPUs. This paper introduces a CNN-ViT hybrid network called SBCFormer, which achieves high accuracy and fast computation on such low-end CPUs. The hardware constraints of these CPUs make the Transformer's attention mechanism preferable to convolution. However, using attention on low-end CPUs presents a challenge: high-resolution internal feature maps demand excessive computational resources, but reducing their resolution results in the loss of local image details. SBCFormer introduces an architectural design to address this issue. As a result, SBCFormer achieves the highest trade-off between accuracy and speed on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with an ARM-Cortex A72 CPU. For the first time, it achieves an ImageNet-1K top-1 accuracy of around 80% at a speed of 1.0 frame/sec on the SBC. Code is available at https://github.com/xyongLu/SBCFormer.

## 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.

- [Image Classification on ImageNet-1K 1.0 (val)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/image-classification-on-imagenet-1k-1-0-val.md>): Image Classification; ImageNet-1K 1.0 (val); Top-1 Accuracy: 81.1.

- [Object Detection on COCO 2017 (val)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/object-detection-on-coco-2017-val.md>): Object Detection; COCO 2017 (val); AP: not recorded.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.03747>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.03747.pdf>)