An SSD-MobileNet Acceleration Strategy for FPGAs Based on Network Compression and Subgraph Fusion

Abstract

Over the last decade, various deep neural network models have achieved great success in image recognition and classification tasks. The vast majority of high-performing deep neural network models have a huge number of parameters and often require sacrificing performance and accuracy when they are deployed on mobile devices with limited area and power consumption. To address this problem, we present an SSD-MobileNet-v1 acceleration method based on network compression and subgraph fusion for Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Firstly, a regularized pruning algorithm based on sensitivity analysis and Filter Pruning via Geometric Median (FPGM) was proposed. Secondly, the Quantize Aware Training (QAT)-based network full quantization algorithm was designed. Finally, a strategy for computing subgraph fusion is proposed for FPGAs to achieve continuous scheduling of Programmable Logic (PL) operators. The experimental results show that using the proposed acceleration strategy can reduce the number of model parameters by a factor of 11 and increase the inference speed on the FPGA platform by a factor of 9–10. The acceleration algorithm is applicable to various mobile edge devices and can be applied to the real-time monitoring of forest fires to improve the intelligence of forest fire detection.