This paper presents a platform that automatically generates custom hardware accelerators for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) implemented in field-programmable gate array (FPGA) devices. It includes a user interface for configuring and managing these accelerators. The herein-presented platform can perform all the processes necessary to design and test CNN accelerators from the CNN architecture description at both layer and internal parameter levels, training the desired architecture with any dataset and generating the configuration files required by the platform. With these files, it can synthesize the register-transfer level (RTL) and program the customized CNN accelerator into the FPGA device for testing, making it possible to generate custom CNN accelerators quickly and easily. All processes save the CNN architecture description are fully automatized and carried out by the platform, which manages third-party software to train the CNN and synthesize and program the generated RTL. The platform has been tested with the implementation of some of the CNN architectures found in the state-of-the-art for freely available datasets such as MNIST, CIFAR-10, and STL-10.
This paper reports the design and analysis of an American Sign Language (ASL) alphabet translation system implemented in hardware using a Field-Programmable Gate Array. The system process consists of three stages, the first being the communication with the neuromorphic camera (also called Dynamic Vision Sensor, DVS) sensor using the Universal Serial Bus protocol. The feature extraction of the events generated by the DVS is the second part of the process, consisting of a presentation of the digital image processing algorithms developed in software, which aim to reduce redundant information and prepare the data for the third stage. The last stage of the system process is the classification of the ASL alphabet, achieved with a single artificial neural network implemented in digital hardware for higher speed. The overall result is the development of a classification system using the ASL signs contour, fully implemented in a reconfigurable device. The experimental results consist of a comparative analysis of the recognition rate among the alphabet signs using the neuromorphic camera in order to prove the proper operation of the digital image processing algorithms. In the experiments performed with 720 samples of 24 signs, a recognition accuracy of 79.58% was obtained.
In this paper, we present a novel approach that aims to solve one of the main challenges in hand gesture recognition tasks in static images, to compensate for the accuracy lost when trained models are used to interpret completely unseen data. The model presented here consists of two main data-processing stages. A deep neural network (DNN) for performing handshape segmentation and classification is used in which multiple architectures and input image sizes were tested and compared to derive the best model in terms of accuracy and processing time. For the experiments presented in this work, the DNN models were trained with 24,000 images of 24 signs from the American Sign Language alphabet and fine-tuned with 5200 images of 26 generated signs. The system was real-time tested with a community of 10 persons, yielding a mean average precision and processing rate of 81.74% and 61.35 frames-per-second, respectively. As a second data-processing stage, a bidirectional long short-term memory neural network was implemented and analyzed for adding spelling correction capability to our system, which scored a training accuracy of 98.07% with a dictionary of 370 words, thus, increasing the robustness in completely unseen data, as shown in our experiments.
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