Software-Defined FPGA Accelerator Design for Mobile Deep Learning Applications

Recently, the field of deep learning has received great attention by the scientific community and it is used to provide improved solutions to many computer vision problems. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been successfully used to attack problems such as object recognition, object detection, semantic segmentation, and scene understanding. The rapid development of deep learning goes hand by hand with the adaptation of GPUs for accelerating its processes, such as network training and inference. Even though FPGA design exists long before the use of GPUs for accelerating computations and despite the fact that high-level synthesis (HLS) tools are getting more attractive, the adaptation of FPGAs for deep learning research and application development is poor due to the requirement of hardware design related expertise. This work presents a workflow for deep learning mobile application acceleration on small low-cost low-power FPGA devices using HLS tools. This workflow eases the design of an improved version of the SqueezeJet accelerator used for the speedup of mobile-friendly low-parameter ImageNet class CNNs, such as the SqueezeNet v1.1 and the ZynqNet. Additionally, the workflow includes the development of an HLS-driven analytical model which is used for performance estimation of the accelerator. This model can be also used to direct the design process and lead to future design improvements and optimizations.

SqueezeJet: High-level Synthesis Accelerator Design for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Deep convolutional neural networks have dominated the pattern recognition scene by providing much more accurate solutions in computer vision problems such as object recognition and object detection. Most of these solutions come at a huge computational cost, requiring billions of multiply-accumulate operations and, thus, making their use quite challenging in real-time applications that run on embedded mobile (resource-power constrained) hardware. This work presents the architecture, the high-level synthesis design, and the implementation of SqueezeJet, an FPGA accelerator for the inference phase of the SqueezeNet DCNN architecture, which is designed specifically for use in embedded systems. Results show that SqueezeJet can achieve 15.16 times speed-up compared to the software implementation of SqueezeNet running on an embedded mobile processor with less than 1% drop in top-5 accuracy.

Expanding a robot's life: Low power object recognition via FPGA-based DCNN deployment

FPGAs are commonly used to accelerate domain-specific algorithmic implementations, as they can achieve impressive performance boosts, are reprogrammable and exhibit minimal power consumption. In this work, the SqueezeNet DCNN is accelerated using an SoC FPGA in order for the offered object recognition resource to be employed in a robotic application. Experiments are conducted to investigate the performance and power consumption of the implementation in comparison to deployment on other widely-used computational systems.