# TinyissimoYOLO: A Quantized, Low-Memory Footprint, TinyML Object Detection Network for Low Power Microcontrollers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.00001 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00001/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [A Survey of Quantization Methods for Efficient Neural Network Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13630/) (2021)
- [Once-for-All: Train One Network and Specialize it for Efficient Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09791/) (2019)
- [To prune, or not to prune: exploring the efficacy of pruning for model compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01878/) (2017)
- [WIDER FACE: A Face Detection Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06523/) (2015)
- [MCUNet: Tiny Deep Learning on IoT Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10319/) (2020)
- [TensorFlow Lite Micro: Embedded Machine Learning on TinyML Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08678/) (2020)
- [MCUNetV2: Memory-Efficient Patch-based Inference for Tiny Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15352/) (2021)
- [Survey of Machine Learning Accelerators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00993/) (2020)
- [FANN-on-MCU: An Open-Source Toolkit for Energy-Efficient Neural Network Inference at the Edge of the Internet of Things](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03314/) (2019)
- [TinyRadarNN: Combining Spatial and Temporal Convolutional Neural Networks for Embedded Gesture Recognition with Short Range Radars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16281/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [A Machine Learning-oriented Survey on Tiny Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11932/) (2023)
- [TinyTracker: Ultra-Fast and Ultra-Low-Power Edge Vision In-Sensor for Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07813/) (2023)
- [Ultra-Efficient On-Device Object Detection on AI-Integrated Smart Glasses with TinyissimoYOLO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01057/) (2023)
- [Flexible and Fully Quantized Ultra-Lightweight TinyissimoYOLO for Ultra-Low-Power Edge Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05999/) (2023)
- [Squeezed Edge YOLO: Onboard Object Detection on Edge Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11716/) (2023)
- [Neural Network Quantization for Microcontrollers: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods, Platforms, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15008/) (2025)
- [DSORT-MCU: Detecting Small Objects in Real-Time on Microcontroller Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16769/) (2024)
- [ELASTIC: Efficient Once For All Iterative Search for Object Detection on Microcontrollers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21999/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Lightweight Neural Networks for Small Object Detection in IoT Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07163/) (2023)
- [DEX: Data Channel Extension for Efficient CNN Inference on Tiny AI Accelerators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06566/) (2024)
- [TinyGLASS: Real-Time Self-Supervised In-Sensor Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16451/) (2026)
- [Q-Segment: Segmenting Images In-Sensor for Vessel-Based Medical Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09854/) (2023)
- [Synergy: Towards On-Body AI via Tiny AI Accelerator Collaboration on Wearables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08637/) (2023)
- [LeYOLO, New Embedded Architecture for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14239/) (2024)
- [Hardware-Aware YOLO Compression for Low-Power Edge AI on STM32U5 for Weeds Detection in Digital Agriculture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07990/) (2025)
- [EETnet: a CNN for Gaze Detection and Tracking for Smart-Eyewear](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04779/) (2025)
- [XiYOLO: Energy-Aware Object Detection via Iterative Architecture Search and Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06927/) (2026)
- [Energy Constrained Hierarchical Underwater Monitoring via Local Multi-Agent RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24313/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces a highly flexible, quantized, memory-efficient, and ultra-lightweight object detection network, called TinyissimoYOLO. It aims to enable object detection on microcontrollers in the power domain of milliwatts, with less than 0.5MB memory available for storing convolutional neural network (CNN) weights. The proposed quantized network architecture with 422k parameters, enables real-time object detection on embedded microcontrollers, and it has been evaluated to exploit CNN accelerators. In particular, the proposed network has been deployed on the MAX78000 microcontroller achieving high frame-rate of up to 180fps and an ultra-low energy consumption of only 196μJ per inference with an inference efficiency of more than 106 MAC/Cycle. TinyissimoYOLO can be trained for any multi-object detection. However, considering the small network size, adding object detection classes will increase the size and memory consumption of the network, thus object detection with up to 3 classes is demonstrated. Furthermore, the network is trained using quantization-aware training and deployed with 8-bit quantization on different microcontrollers, such as STM32H7A3, STM32L4R9, Apollo4b and on the MAX78000's CNN accelerator. Performance evaluations are presented in this paper.