arXiv subjects

Lukas Cavigelli

Publications and source records attributed to Lukas Cavigelli.

64 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Design Automation for Binarized Neural Networks: A Quantum Leap Opportunity?

Design automation in general, and in particular logic synthesis, can play a key role in enabling the design of application-specific Binarized Neural Networks (BNN). This paper presents the hardware design and synthesis of a purely combinational BNN for ultra-low power near-sensor processing. We leverage the major opportunities raised by BNN models, which consist mostly of logical bit-wise operations and integer counting and comparisons, for pushing ultra-low power deep learning circuits close to the sensor and coupling it with binarized mixed-signal image sensor data. We analyze area, power and energy metrics of BNNs synthesized as combinational networks. Our synthesis results in GlobalFoundries 22nm SOI technology shows a silicon area of 2.61mm2 for implementing a combinational BNN with 32x32 binary input sensor receptive field and weight parameters fixed at design time. This is 2.2x smaller than a synthesized network with re-configurable parameters. With respect to other comparable techniques for deep learning near-sensor processing, our approach features a 10x higher energy efficiency.

cs.OH↗

arXiv2017

Hydra: An Accelerator for Real-Time Edge-Aware Permeability Filtering in 65nm CMOS

Many modern video processing pipelines rely on edge-aware (EA) filtering methods. However, recent high-quality methods are challenging to run in real-time on embedded hardware due to their computational load. To this end, we propose an area-efficient and real-time capable hardware implementation of a high quality EA method. In particular, we focus on the recently proposed permeability filter (PF) that delivers promising quality and performance in the domains of HDR tone mapping, disparity and optical flow estimation. We present an efficient hardware accelerator that implements a tiled variant of the PF with low on-chip memory requirements and a significantly reduced external memory bandwidth (6.4x w.r.t. the non-tiled PF). The design has been taped out in 65 nm CMOS technology, is able to filter 720p grayscale video at 24.8 Hz and achieves a high compute density of 6.7 GFLOPS/mm2 (12x higher than embedded GPUs when scaled to the same technology node). The low area and bandwidth requirements make the accelerator highly suitable for integration into SoCs where silicon area budget is constrained and external memory is typically a heavily contended resource.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2017

Efficient Convolutional Neural Network For Audio Event Detection

Wireless distributed systems as used in sensor networks, Internet-of-Things and cyber-physical systems, impose high requirements on resource efficiency. Advanced preprocessing and classification of data at the network edge can help to decrease the communication demand and to reduce the amount of data to be processed centrally. In the area of distributed acoustic sensing, the combination of algorithms with a high classification rate and resource-constraint embedded systems is essential. Unfortunately, algorithms for acoustic event detection have a high memory and computational demand and are not suited for execution at the network edge. This paper addresses these aspects by applying structural optimizations to a convolutional neural network for audio event detection to reduce the memory requirement by a factor of more than 500 and the computational effort by a factor of 2.1 while performing 9.2% better.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

CBinfer: Change-Based Inference for Convolutional Neural Networks on Video Data

Extracting per-frame features using convolutional neural networks for real-time processing of video data is currently mainly performed on powerful GPU-accelerated workstations and compute clusters. However, there are many applications such as smart surveillance cameras that require or would benefit from on-site processing. To this end, we propose and evaluate a novel algorithm for change-based evaluation of CNNs for video data recorded with a static camera setting, exploiting the spatio-temporal sparsity of pixel changes. We achieve an average speed-up of 8.6x over a cuDNN baseline on a realistic benchmark with a negligible accuracy loss of less than 0.1% and no retraining of the network. The resulting energy efficiency is 10x higher than that of per-frame evaluation and reaches an equivalent of 328 GOp/s/W on the Tegra X1 platform.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Deep Structured Features for Semantic Segmentation

We propose a highly structured neural network architecture for semantic segmentation with an extremely small model size, suitable for low-power embedded and mobile platforms. Specifically, our architecture combines i) a Haar wavelet-based tree-like convolutional neural network (CNN), ii) a random layer realizing a radial basis function kernel approximation, and iii) a linear classifier. While stages i) and ii) are completely pre-specified, only the linear classifier is learned from data. We apply the proposed architecture to outdoor scene and aerial image semantic segmentation and show that the accuracy of our architecture is competitive with conventional pixel classification CNNs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed architecture is data efficient in the sense of matching the accuracy of pixel classification CNNs when trained on a much smaller data set.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Soft-to-Hard Vector Quantization for End-to-End Learning Compressible Representations

We present a new approach to learn compressible representations in deep architectures with an end-to-end training strategy. Our method is based on a soft (continuous) relaxation of quantization and entropy, which we anneal to their discrete counterparts throughout training. We showcase this method for two challenging applications: Image compression and neural network compression. While these tasks have typically been approached with different methods, our soft-to-hard quantization approach gives results competitive with the state-of-the-art for both.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

YodaNN: An Architecture for Ultra-Low Power Binary-Weight CNN Acceleration

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have revolutionized the world of computer vision over the last few years, pushing image classification beyond human accuracy. The computational effort of today's CNNs requires power-hungry parallel processors or GP-GPUs. Recent developments in CNN accelerators for system-on-chip integration have reduced energy consumption significantly. Unfortunately, even these highly optimized devices are above the power envelope imposed by mobile and deeply embedded applications and face hard limitations caused by CNN weight I/O and storage. This prevents the adoption of CNNs in future ultra-low power Internet of Things end-nodes for near-sensor analytics. Recent algorithmic and theoretical advancements enable competitive classification accuracy even when limiting CNNs to binary (+1/-1) weights during training. These new findings bring major optimization opportunities in the arithmetic core by removing the need for expensive multiplications, as well as reducing I/O bandwidth and storage. In this work, we present an accelerator optimized for binary-weight CNNs that achieves 1510 GOp/s at 1.2 V on a core area of only 1.33 MGE (Million Gate Equivalent) or 0.19 mm$^2$ and with a power dissipation of 895 μW in UMC 65 nm technology at 0.6 V. Our accelerator significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of energy and area efficiency achieving 61.2 TOp/s/W@0.6 V and 1135 GOp/s/MGE@1.2 V, respectively.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2016

CAS-CNN: A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Image Compression Artifact Suppression

Lossy image compression algorithms are pervasively used to reduce the size of images transmitted over the web and recorded on data storage media. However, we pay for their high compression rate with visual artifacts degrading the user experience. Deep convolutional neural networks have become a widespread tool to address high-level computer vision tasks very successfully. Recently, they have found their way into the areas of low-level computer vision and image processing to solve regression problems mostly with relatively shallow networks. We present a novel 12-layer deep convolutional network for image compression artifact suppression with hierarchical skip connections and a multi-scale loss function. We achieve a boost of up to 1.79 dB in PSNR over ordinary JPEG and an improvement of up to 0.36 dB over the best previous ConvNet result. We show that a network trained for a specific quality factor (QF) is resilient to the QF used to compress the input image - a single network trained for QF 60 provides a PSNR gain of more than 1.5 dB over the wide QF range from 40 to 76.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2016

Computationally Efficient Target Classification in Multispectral Image Data with Deep Neural Networks

Detecting and classifying targets in video streams from surveillance cameras is a cumbersome, error-prone and expensive task. Often, the incurred costs are prohibitive for real-time monitoring. This leads to data being stored locally or transmitted to a central storage site for post-incident examination. The required communication links and archiving of the video data are still expensive and this setup excludes preemptive actions to respond to imminent threats. An effective way to overcome these limitations is to build a smart camera that transmits alerts when relevant video sequences are detected. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have come to outperform humans in visual classifications tasks. The concept of DNNs and Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) can easily be extended to make use of higher-dimensional input data such as multispectral data. We explore this opportunity in terms of achievable accuracy and required computational effort. To analyze the precision of DNNs for scene labeling in an urban surveillance scenario we have created a dataset with 8 classes obtained in a field experiment. We combine an RGB camera with a 25-channel VIS-NIR snapshot sensor to assess the potential of multispectral image data for target classification. We evaluate several new DNNs, showing that the spectral information fused together with the RGB frames can be used to improve the accuracy of the system or to achieve similar accuracy with a 3x smaller computation effort. We achieve a very high per-pixel accuracy of 99.1%. Even for scarcely occurring, but particularly interesting classes, such as cars, 75% of the pixels are labeled correctly with errors occurring only around the border of the objects. This high accuracy was obtained with a training set of only 30 labeled images, paving the way for fast adaptation to various application scenarios.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2016

Origami: A 803 GOp/s/W Convolutional Network Accelerator

An ever increasing number of computer vision and image/video processing challenges are being approached using deep convolutional neural networks, obtaining state-of-the-art results in object recognition and detection, semantic segmentation, action recognition, optical flow and superresolution. Hardware acceleration of these algorithms is essential to adopt these improvements in embedded and mobile computer vision systems. We present a new architecture, design and implementation as well as the first reported silicon measurements of such an accelerator, outperforming previous work in terms of power-, area- and I/O-efficiency. The manufactured device provides up to 196 GOp/s on 3.09 mm^2 of silicon in UMC 65nm technology and can achieve a power efficiency of 803 GOp/s/W. The massively reduced bandwidth requirements make it the first architecture scalable to TOp/s performance.

cs.CV↗