# ImageSig: A signature transform for ultra-lightweight image recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.06929 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06929/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (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)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05877/) (2017)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [MnasNet: Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11626/) (2018)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [MobileViT: Light-weight, General-purpose, and Mobile-friendly Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02178/) (2021)
- [Perceiver IO: A General Architecture for Structured Inputs & Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14795/) (2021)
- [How to train your ViT? Data, Augmentation, and Regularization in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10270/) (2021)
- [ConViT: Improving Vision Transformers with Soft Convolutional Inductive Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10697/) (2021)
- [The Effectiveness of Data Augmentation in Image Classification using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04621/) (2017)
- [Escaping the Big Data Paradigm with Compact Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05704/) (2021)
- [When Vision Transformers Outperform ResNets without Pre-training or Strong Data Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01548/) (2021)
- [Incremental Network Quantization: Towards Lossless CNNs with Low-Precision Weights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03044/) (2017)
- [Quantized Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.06473/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Transforming CCTV cameras into NO2 sensors at city scale for adaptive policymaking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00056/) (2024)
- [FaceTouch: Detecting hand-to-face touch with supervised contrastive learning to assist in tracing infectious disease](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12840/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces a new lightweight method for image recognition. ImageSig is based on computing signatures and does not require a convolutional structure or an attention-based encoder. It is striking to the authors that it achieves: a) an accuracy for 64 X 64 RGB images that exceeds many of the state-of-the-art methods and simultaneously b) requires orders of magnitude less FLOPS, power and memory footprint. The pretrained model can be as small as 44.2 KB in size. ImageSig shows unprecedented performance on hardware such as Raspberry Pi and Jetson-nano. ImageSig treats images as streams with multiple channels. These streams are parameterized by spatial directions. We contribute to the functionality of signature and rough path theory to stream-like data and vision tasks on static images beyond temporal streams. With very few parameters and small size models, the key advantage is that one could have many of these "detectors" assembled on the same chip; moreover, the feature acquisition can be performed once and shared between different models of different tasks - further accelerating the process. This contributes to energy efficiency and the advancements of embedded AI at the edge.