A lightweight tire tread image classification network

VCIP 2022 'Tire pattern image classification based on lightweight network challenge' aims to design lightweight networks that correctly classify tire surface tread patterns and indentation images using less overhead. To this end, we present a novel lightweight tire tread classification network. Concretely, we adopt the ShuffleNet-V2-x0.5 network as our backbone. To reduce the computation complexity, we introduce the Space-To-Depth and Anti-Alias Downsampling modules to pre-process the input image. Moreover, to enhance the classification ability of our model, we adopt the knowledge distillation strategy by considering Vision Transformer as the teacher network. To ensure the robustness of our model, we pre-train it on ImageNet and fine-tune the training set of the challenge. Experiments on the challenge dataset demonstrate that our model achieves supe-rior performance, with 99.00% classification accuracy, 25.51M FLOPs, and 0.20M parameters.