METHOD AND DEVICE FOR QUANTIZING COMPLEX ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK

Systems, apparatus and methods are provided for accelerating a complex neural network by fixed-point data quantization. An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) has branches and comprises convolutional layers CONV 1, CONV 2, . . . CONV n, fully connected layers FC 1, FC 2, . . . , FC m, and concatenation layers CONCAT1, CONCAT2, . . . , CONCAT L. n, m and L are positive integers. The ANN may be optimized by a method comprising: converting output of each of the CONV, FC and CONCAT layers into fixed-point numbers, identifying at least one sub-network from the ANN and for each sub-network, modifying the fixed-point range of each output of the previous-level layers of the CONCAT layer on the basis of the fixed-point range of the CONCAT layer. The sub-network has a CONCAT layer as its output. The CONCAT layer receives at least two outputs of previous-level layers as inputs and concatenates the inputs into one output.