Leveraging Simultaneous Usage of Edge GPU Hardware Engines for Video Face Detection and Recognition

Video face detection and recognition in public places at the edge is required in several applications, such as security reinforcement and contactless access to authorized venues. This paper aims to maximize the simultaneous usage of hardware engines available in edge GPUs nowadays by leveraging the concurrency and pipelining of tasks required for face detection and recognition. This also includes the video decoding task, which is required in most face monitoring applications as the video streams are usually carried via Gbps Ethernet network. This constitutes an improvement over previous works where the tasks are usually allocated to a single engine due to the lack of a unified and automated framework that simultaneously explores all hardware engines. In addition, previously, the input faces were usually embedded in still images or within raw video streams that overlook the burst delay caused by the decoding stage. The results on real-life video streams suggest that simultaneously using all the hardware engines available in the recent NVIDIA edge Orin GPU, higher throughput, and a slight saving of power consumption of around 300 mW, accounting for around 5%, have been achieved while satisfying the real-time performance constraint. The performance gets even higher by considering several video streams simultaneously. Further performance improvement could have been obtained if the number of shuffle layers that were created by the tensor RT framework for the face recognition task was lower. Thus, the paper suggests some hardware improvements to the existing edge GPU processors to enhance their performance even higher.

Edge-GPU Based Face Tracking for Face Detection and Recognition Acceleration

Cost-effective machine vision systems dedicated to real-time and accurate face detection and recognition in public places are crucial for many modern applications. However, despite their high performance, which could be reached using specialized edge or cloud AI hardware accelerators, there is still room for improvement in throughput and power consumption. This paper aims to suggest a combined hardware-software approach that optimizes face detection and recognition systems on one of the latest edge GPUs, namely NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin. First, it leverages the simultaneous usage of all its hardware engines to improve processing time. This offers an improvement over previous works where these tasks were mainly allocated automatically and exclusively to the CPU or, to a higher extent, to the GPU core. Additionally, the paper suggests integrating a face tracker module to avoid redundantly running the face recognition algorithm for every frame but only when a new face appears in the scene. The results of extended experiments suggest that simultaneous usage of all the hardware engines that are available in the Orin GPU and tracker integration into the pipeline yield an impressive throughput of 290 FPS (frames per second) on 1920 x 1080 input size frames containing in average of 6 faces/frame. Additionally, a substantial saving of power consumption of around 800 mW was achieved when compared to running the task on the CPU/GPU engines only and without integrating a tracker into the Orin GPU\'92s pipeline. This hardware-codesign approach can pave the way to design high-performance machine vision systems at the edge, critically needed in video monitoring in public places where several nearby cameras are usually deployed for a same scene.