A Lightweight Model of Learning Common Features in Different Domains for Classification Tasks

The increasing size of recent deep neural networks, particularly when applied to learning across multiple domains, limits their deployment in resource-constrained environments. To address this issue, this study proposes a lightweight neural architecture with a parallel structure of convolutional layers to enable efficient and scalable multi-domain learning. The proposed network includes an individual feature extractor for domain-specific features and a common feature extractor for the shared features. This design minimizes redundancy and significantly reduces the number of parameters while preserving classification performance. To evaluate the proposed method, experiments were conducted using four image classification datasets: MNIST, FMNIST, CIFAR10, and SVHN. These experiments focused on classification settings where each image contained a single dominant object without relying on large pretrained models. The proposed model achieved high accuracy while significantly reducing the number of parameters. It required only 3.9 M parameters for learning across the four datasets, compared to 33.6 M for VGG16. The model achieved an accuracy of 98.87% on MNIST and 85.83% on SVHN, outperforming other lightweight models, including MobileNet v2 and EfficientNet v2b0, and was comparable to ResNet50. These findings indicate that the proposed architecture has the potential to support multi-domain learning while minimizing model complexity. This approach may be beneficial for applications in resource-constrained environments.