# CSL-YOLO: A New Lightweight Object Detection System for Edge Computing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.04829 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04829/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [GhostNet: More Features from Cheap Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11907/) (2019)
- [Soft-NMS -- Improving Object Detection With One Line of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04503/) (2017)
- [CSPNet: A New Backbone that can Enhance Learning Capability of CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11929/) (2019)
- [Rethinking ImageNet Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08883/) (2018)
- [Mish: A Self Regularized Non-Monotonic Activation Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08681/) (2019)
- [Pelee: A Real-Time Object Detection System on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06882/) (2018)
- [YOLO-LITE: A Real-Time Object Detection Algorithm Optimized for Non-GPU Computers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05588/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Optimizing Edge Offloading Decisions for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18919/) (2024)
- [High-Speed Detector For Low-Powered Devices In Aerial Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14591/) (2024)
- [Siamese-NAS: Using Trained Samples Efficiently to Find Lightweight Neural Architecture by Prior Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00546/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The development of lightweight object detectors is essential due to the limited computation resources. To reduce the computation cost, how to generate redundant features plays a significant role. This paper proposes a new lightweight Convolution method Cross-Stage Lightweight (CSL) Module, to generate redundant features from cheap operations. In the intermediate expansion stage, we replaced Pointwise Convolution with Depthwise Convolution to produce candidate features. The proposed CSL-Module can reduce the computation cost significantly. Experiments conducted at MS-COCO show that the proposed CSL-Module can approximate the fitting ability of Convolution-3x3. Finally, we use the module to construct a lightweight detector CSL-YOLO, achieving better detection performance with only 43% FLOPs and 52% parameters than Tiny-YOLOv4.