Convolutional Neural Network Model Compression Method for Software—Hardware Co-Design

Abstract

Owing to their high accuracy, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are extensively used. However, they are characterized by high complexity. Real-time performance and acceleration are required in current CNN systems. A graphics processing unit (GPU) is one possible solution to improve real-time performance; however, its power consumption ratio is poor owing to high power consumption. By contrast, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have lower power consumption and flexible architecture, making them more suitable for CNN implementation. In this study, we propose a method that offers both the speed of CNNs and the power and parallelism of FPGAs. This solution relies on two primary acceleration techniques—parallel processing of layer resources and pipelining within specific layers. Moreover, a new method is introduced for exchanging domain requirements for speed and design time by implementing an automatic parallel hardware–software co-design CNN using the software-defined system-on-chip tool. We evaluated the proposed method using five networks—MobileNetV1, ShuffleNetV2, SqueezeNet, ResNet-50, and VGG-16—and FPGA processors—ZCU102. We experimentally demonstrated that our design has a higher speed-up than the conventional implementation method. The proposed method achieves 2.47×, 1.93×, and 2.16× speed-up on the ZCU102 for MobileNetV1, ShuffleNetV2, and SqueezeNet, respectively.