Lightweight Disaster Semantic Segmentation for UAV On-Device Intelligence

Hanbin Lee, Gihwan Kim, Sangho Ha, Hyungshin Kim

Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being used for monitoring natural disasters. To promptly assess the severity of the disaster, it is advantageous to analyze the disaster scenes with the on-board computer in real time. Various AI segmentation models with high accuracy are developed mainly for offline processing. They require significant memory capacity and computational power. However, on-device AI has the challenge of compressing high-precision models due to the limited memory size and the small computation power. In this research, we develop a lightweight disaster semantic segmentation model for UAV on-device intelligence. From a simple FANet as our baseline, we apply various optimization, such as compact backbone, lightweight attention block, quantization, knowledge distillation, and post processing. With our optimized model, we can reduce 84.2% of the inference time while achieving 0.5% increase in accuracy compared to the baseline model.

External IDs:dblp:conf/igarss/LeeKHK24