In the past years, several works have proposed custom hardware and software-based techniques for the acceleration of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Most of these works focus on saving computations by changing the used precision or modifying frame processing. To reach a more aggressive energy reduction, in this paper we propose software-only modifications to the CNNs inference process.
Our approach exploits the inherent locality in videos by replacing entire frame computations with a movement prediction algorithm. Furthermore, when a frame must be processed, we avoid energy-demanding floating-point operations, and at the same time reduce memory accesses by employing look-up tables in place of the original convolutions.
Using the proposed approach, one can reach significant energy gains of more than 25× for security cameras, and 12× for moving vehicles applications, with only small software modifications.
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