DAC-Loop: Distillation-Aware Compression for Remote Sensing CNN
Rico Staedeli, Lorena Raichle, Konstantinos Tzevelekakis, Aron Asefaw, Damian Borth
Abstract
While large-scale models achieve strong results in remote sensing scene classification, deploying them on edge devices remains difficult due to limited compute, memory, and energy budgets. Compact CNN backbones are therefore a practical choice in many real-world settings, offering efficient inference with well-optimized implementations on embedded hardware. To push this efficiency further, we investigate how far a knowledge-distilled student model can be compressed while preserving high accuracy. We propose a Distillation-Aware Compression Loop (DAC-Loop) that integrates (i) knowledge distillation applied both before and after structured channel pruning, and (ii) an iterative compression schedule that alternates structured pruning with unstructured sparsification. Across EuroSAT and NWPU-RESISC45, the DAC-Loop consistently improves the accuracy-compression trade-off relative to standard one-shot pruning and single-stage KD recovery, maintaining strong accuracy even beyond 90% parameter reduction. These results demonstrate that combining distillation and pruning in a unified iterative loop offers an effective path toward compact remote sensing models.