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- A fast and scalable architecture to run convolutional neural networks in low density FPGAsPublication . Véstias, Mário; Duarte, Rui; De Sousa, Jose; Neto, Horácio CDeep learning and, in particular, convolutional neural networks (CNN) achieve very good results on several computer vision applications like security and surveillance, where image and video analysis are required. These networks are quite demanding in terms of computation and memory and therefore are usually implemented in high-performance computing platforms or devices. Running CNNs in embedded platforms or devices with low computational and memory resources requires a careful optimization of system architectures and algorithms to obtain very efficient designs. In this context, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) can achieve this efficiency since the programmable hardware fabric can be tailored for each specific network. In this paper, a very efficient configurable architecture for CNN inference targeting any density FPGAs is described. The architecture considers fixed-point arithmetic and image batch to reduce computational, memory and memory bandwidth requirements without compromising network accuracy. The developed architecture supports the execution of large CNNs in any FPGA devices including those with small on-chip memory size and logic resources. With the proposed architecture, it is possible to infer an image in AlexNet in 4.3 ms in a ZYNQ7020 and 1.2 ms in a ZYNQ7045.
- Moving deep learning to the edgePublication . Véstias, Mário; Duarte, Rui Policarpo; De Sousa, Jose; Neto, Horácio CDeep learning is now present in a wide range of services and applications, replacing and complementing other machine learning algorithms. Performing training and inference of deep neural networks using the cloud computing model is not viable for applications where low latency is required. Furthermore, the rapid proliferation of the Internet of Things will generate a large volume of data to be processed, which will soon overload the capacity of cloud servers. One solution is to process the data at the edge devices themselves, in order to alleviate cloud server workloads and improve latency. However, edge devices are less powerful than cloud servers, and many are subject to energy constraints. Hence, new resource and energy-oriented deep learning models are required, as well as new computing platforms. This paper reviews the main research directions for edge computing deep learning algorithms.
- A configurable architecture for running hybrid convolutional neural networks in low-density FPGAsPublication . Véstias, Mário; Duarte, Rui; De Sousa, Jose; Cláudio de Campos Neto, HorácioConvolutional neural networks have become the state of the art of machine learning for a vast set of applications, especially for image classification and object detection. There are several advantages to running inference on these models at the edge, including real-time performance and data privacy. The high computing and memory requirements of convolutional neural networks have been major obstacles to the broader deployment of CNNs on edge devices. Data quantization is an optimization method that reduces the number of bits used to represent weights and activations of a network model, minimizing storage requirements and computing complexity. Quantization can be applied at the layer level, by using different bit widths in different layers: this is called hybrid quantization. This article proposes a new efficient and configurable architecture for running CNNs with hybrid quantization in low-density Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) targeting edge devices. The architecture has been implemented on the Xilinx ZYNQ7020/45 devices and is running the AlexNet and VGG16 networks. Running AlexNet, the architecture has a throughput up to 508 images per second on the ZYNQ7020 device, and 1639 images per second on the ZYNQ7045 device. Considering VGG16, the architecture delivers up to 43 images per second on the ZYNQ7020 device, and 81 images per second on the ZYNQ7045 device. The proposed hybrid architecture achieves up to 13.7 x improvement in performance compared to state-of-the-art solutions, with small accuracy degradation.