An embedded inference framework for convolutional neural network applications

Abstract

With the rapid development of deep convolutional neural networks, more and more computer vision tasks have been well resolved. These convolutional neural network solutions rely heavily on the performance of the hardware. However, due to privacy issues or the network instability, we need to run convolutional neural networks on embedded platforms. Critical challenges will be raised by limited hardware resources on the embedded platform. In this paper, we design and implement an embedded inference framework to accelerate the inference of the convolutional neural network on the embedded platform. For this, we first analyzed the time-consuming layers in the inference process of the network, and then we design optimization methods for these layers. Also, we design a memory pool specifically for neural networks. Our experimental results show that our embedded inference framework can run a classification model MobileNet in 80ms and a detection model MobileNet-SSD in 155ms on Firefly-RK3399 development board.