Contention Grading and Adaptive Model Selection for Machine Vision in Embedded Systems

Abstract

Real-time machine vision applications running on resource-constrained embedded systems face challenges for maintaining performance. An especially challenging scenario arises when multiple applications execute at the same time, creating contention for the computational resources of the system. This contention results in increase in inference delay of the machine vision applications, which can be unacceptable for time-critical tasks. To address this challenge, we propose an adaptive model selection framework that mitigates the impact of system contention and prevents unexpected increases in inference delay by trading off the application accuracy minimally. The framework has two parts, which are performed pre-deployment and at runtime. The pre-deployment part profiles the system for contention in a black-box manner and produces a model set that is specifically optimized for the contention levels observed in the system. The runtime part predicts the inference delays of each model considering the system contention and selects the best model according to the predictions for each frame. Compared to a fixed individual model with similar accuracy, our framework improves the performance by significantly reducing the inference delay violations against a specified threshold. We implement our framework on the Nvidia Jetson TX2 platform and show that our approach achieves greater than 20% reductions in delay violations over the individual baseline models.