# A Novel Compression Framework for YOLOv8: Achieving Real-Time Aerial Object Detection on Edge Devices via Structured Pruning and Channel-Wise Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12918 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12918/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [Learning Efficient Convolutional Networks through Network Slimming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06519/) (2017)
- [ThiNet: A Filter Level Pruning Method for Deep Neural Network Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06342/) (2017)
- [EIE: Efficient Inference Engine on Compressed Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01528/) (2016)
- [Structured Knowledge Distillation for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04197/) (2019)
- [YOLOv6: A Single-Stage Object Detection Framework for Industrial Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02976/) (2022)
- [Scaled-YOLOv4: Scaling Cross Stage Partial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08036/) (2020)
- [Object Detection in Aerial Images: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12219/) (2021)
- [Distilling Object Detectors with Fine-grained Feature Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03609/) (2019)
- [Channel-wise Knowledge Distillation for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13256/) (2020)
- [Masked Gradient-Based Causal Structure Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.08527/) (2019)
- [Self-Knowledge Distillation in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01851/) (2019)
- [STDP Based Pruning of Connections and Weight Quantization in Spiking Neural Networks for Energy Efficient Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04734/) (2017)
- [QKD: Quantization-aware Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12491/) (2019)
- [CHEX: CHannel EXploration for CNN Model Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15794/) (2022)
- [YOLObile: Real-Time Object Detection on Mobile Devices via Compression-Compilation Co-Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05697/) (2020)
- [Obtaining Faithful Interpretations from Compositional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00724/) (2020)
- [Towards Zero-Shot Knowledge Distillation for Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15495/) (2020)
- [Knowledge Distillation with Feature Maps for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00660/) (2018)
- [Guided Hybrid Quantization for Object detection in Multimodal Remote Sensing Imagery via One-to-one Self-teaching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00131/) (2022)
- [Knowledge Distillation from Multiple Foundation Models for End-to-End Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10917/) (2023)
- [R-TOSS: A Framework for Real-Time Object Detection using Semi-Structured Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02191/) (2023)
- [Channel Pruned YOLOv5-based Deep Learning Approach for Rapid and Accurate Outdoor Obstacles Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13699/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Efficient deployment of deep learning models for aerial object detection on resource-constrained devices requires significant compression without com-promising performance. In this study, we propose a novel three-stage compression pipeline for the YOLOv8 object detection model, integrating sparsity-aware training, structured channel pruning, and Channel-Wise Knowledge Distillation (CWD). First, sparsity-aware training introduces dynamic sparsity during model optimization, effectively balancing parameter reduction and detection accuracy. Second, we apply structured channel pruning by leveraging batch normalization scaling factors to eliminate redundant channels, significantly reducing model size and computational complexity. Finally, to mitigate the accuracy drop caused by pruning, we employ CWD to transfer knowledge from the original model, using an adjustable temperature and loss weighting scheme tailored for small and medium object detection. Extensive experiments on the VisDrone dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple YOLOv8 variants. For YOLOv8m, our method reduces model parameters from 25.85M to 6.85M (a 73.51% reduction), FLOPs from 49.6G to 13.3G, and MACs from 101G to 34.5G, while reducing AP50 by only 2.7%. The resulting compressed model achieves 47.9 AP50 and boosts inference speed from 26 FPS (YOLOv8m baseline) to 45 FPS, enabling real-time deployment on edge devices. We further apply TensorRT as a lightweight optimization step. While this introduces a minor drop in AP50 (from 47.9 to 47.6), it significantly improves inference speed from 45 to 68 FPS, demonstrating the practicality of our approach for high-throughput, re-source-constrained scenarios.