App. Res. of Comp. Accepted Paper
Vol. 43, 2026 No. 5

Survey on knowledge distillation in object detection

Wang Tianqi
Li Yang
Pan Zhisong
School of Command & Control Engineering, Army Engineering University of PLA, Nanjing 210000, China
DOI: 10.19734/j.issn.1001-3695.2025.10.0385

Abstract

High-precision object detection models demand substantial computational resources and contain massive parameters, making their deployment on resource-constrained edge devices challenging. Knowledge distillation, as an efficient model compression technique, effectively transfers knowledge from a complex teacher object detector to a lightweight student object detector, maximizing the performance of the deployed detection model. Currently, there is a lack of comprehensive surveys on knowledge distillation for object detection. To bridge this gap, this study begins by categorizing mainstream knowledge distillation for object detection methods into three major types: logits-based distillation, feature-based distillation, and relation-based distillation, Then reviews the research progress in each category, comparing and summarizing their respective advantages and disadvantages. Furthermore, performance comprehensive comparison and analysis of these three approaches on the MS COCO dataset and three mainstream detector architectures. Finally, this paper outlines future research directions and challenges about knowledge distillation for object detection method, offering relevant application and research recommendations for scholars.

Foundation Support

国家自然科学基金资助项目(62076251)

Publish Information

DOI: 10.19734/j.issn.1001-3695.2025.10.0385
Publish at: Application Research of Computers Accepted Paper, Vol. 43, 2026 No. 5

Publish History

[2026-01-15] Accepted Paper

Cite This Article

王天骐, 李阳, 潘志松. 目标检测知识蒸馏综述 [J]. 计算机应用研究, 2026, 43 (5). (2026-01-20). https://doi.org/10.19734/j.issn.1001-3695.2025.10.0385. (Wang Tianqi, Li Yang, Pan Zhisong. Survey on knowledge distillation in object detection [J]. Application Research of Computers, 2026, 43 (5). (2026-01-20). https://doi.org/10.19734/j.issn.1001-3695.2025.10.0385. )

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  • Application Research of Computers Monthly Journal
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    CN  51-1196/TP

Application Research of Computers, founded in 1984, is an academic journal of computing technology sponsored by Sichuan Institute of Computer Sciences under the Science and Technology Department of Sichuan Province.

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