DCSF-KD: Dynamic Channel-wise Spatial Feature Knowledge Distillation for Object Detection

Abstract Knowledge distillation (KD) has recently gained great success in the field of object detection. By transferring the knowledge of the spatial or channel domain from the teacher model to the student model, it allows for a more compact representation with minimal performance loss. Despite this progress, existing KD methods typically treat knowledge from spatial or channel domains independently, ignoring the exploitation of the mutual relationship between these domains. In this work, we first explore the connection between spatial and channel domains and find there exists a strong correlation between them, i.e. the salient channels tend to contain significant object regions in the spatial domain. Motivated by this observation, we propose DCSF-KD, a novel Dynamic Channel-wise Spatial Feature Knowledge Distillation framework for object detection by fully exploiting both spatial and channel knowledge. Specifically, we introduce channel-wise spatial feature distillation and global channel attention distillation, using information from both domains to improve the accuracy of the student network. Experiments demonstrate that our DCSF-KD outperforms existing detection methods on both homogeneous and heterogeneous teacher-student network pairs. For example, when using the MaskRCNN-Swin detector as the teacher, and based on RetinaNet and FCOS with ResNet-50 on MS COCO, our DCSF-KD can achieve 41.9% and 44.1% mAP, respectively.