BacalhauNet: A tiny CNN for lightning-fast modulation classification

Deep learning methods have been shown to be competitive solutions for modulation classification tasks, but suffer from being computationally expensive, limiting their use on embedded devices. We propose a new deep neural network architecture which employs known structures, depth-wise separable convolution and residual connections, as well as a compression methodology, which combined lead to a tiny and fast algorithm for modulation classification. Our compressed model won the first place in ITU's AI/ML in 5G Challenge 2021, achieving 61.73× compression over the challenge baseline and being over 2.6× better than the second best submission. The source code of this work is publicly available at github.com/ITU-AI- ML-in-5G-Challenge/ITU-ML5G-PS-007-BacalhauNet.