Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have attained remarkable success in numerous visual recognition tasks. There are two challenges when adopting CNNs in real-world applications: a) Existing CNNs are computationally expensive and memory intensive, impeding their use in edge computing; b) there is no standard methodology for designing the CNN architecture for the intended problem. network pruning/compression has emerged as a research direction to address the first challenge, and it has proven to moderate CNN computational load successfully. For the second challenge, various evolutionary algorithms have been proposed thus far. The algorithm proposed in this paper can be viewed as a solution to both challenges. Instead of using constant predefined criteria to evaluate the filters of CNN layers, the proposed algorithm establishes evaluation criteria in online manner during network training based on the combination of each filter’s profit in its layer and the next layer. In addition, the novel method suggested that it inserts new filters into the CNN layers. The proposed algorithm is not simply a pruning strategy but determines the optimal number of filters. Training on multiple CNN architectures allows us to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach empirically. Compared to current pruning algorithms, our algorithm yields a network with a remarkable prune ratio and accuracy. Despite the relatively high computational cost of an epoch in the proposed algorithm in pruning, altogether it achieves the resultant network faster than other algorithms.

Finger-Knuckle-Print (FKP) is an accurate and reliable biometric in compare to other hand-based biometrics like fingerprint because of the finger's dorsal region is not exposed to surfaces. In this paper, a simple end-to-end method based on convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed for FKP recognition. The proposed model is composed only of three convolutional layers and two fully connected layers. The number of trainable parameters hereby has significantly reduced. Additionally, a straightforward method is utilized for data augmentation in this paper. The performance of the proposed network is evaluated on Poly-U FKP dataset based on 10-fold cross-validation. The best recognition accuracy, mean accuracy and standard deviation are 99.83%, 99.18%, and 0.76, respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-arts in terms of recognition accuracy and the number of trainable parameters. Also, in compare to four fine-tuned CNN models including AlexNet, VGG16, ResNet34, and GoogleNet, the proposed simple method achieved higher performance in terms of recognition accuracy and the numbers of trainable parameters and training time.

Due to the cursive-ness and high variability of Persian scripts, the segmentation of handwritten words into sub-words is still a challenging task. These issues could be addressed in a holistic approach by sidestepping segmentation at the character level. In this paper, an end-to-end holistic method based on deep convolutional neural network is proposed to recognize off-line Persian handwritten words. The proposed model uses only five convolutional layers and two fully connected layers for classifying word images effectively, which can lead to a substantial reduction in parameters. The effect of various pooling strategies is also investigated in this paper. The primary goal of this article is to ignore handcrafted feature extraction and attain a generalized and stable word recognition system. The presented model is assessed using two famous handwritten Persian word databases called Sadri and IRANSHAHR. The recognition accuracies were obtained at 98.6% and 94.6%, on Sadri and IRANSHAHR datasets respectively, and outperformed the state-of-the-art methods.