TinyML: Adopting tiny machine learning in smart cities

Abstract

<div><p>Since Tiny machine learning (TinyML) is a quickly evolving subject, it is crucial that internet of things (IoT) devices be able to communicate with one another for the sake of stability and future development. TinyML is a rapidly growing subfield at the intersection of computer science, software engineering, and machine learning. Building deep learning (DL) networks that are a few hundred KBs in size has been the focus of recent research in this area. Deploying TinyML into small devices makes them smart. Reduced computation, power usage, and response time are just a few of the many advantages of TinyML. In this work, we provide an introduction to TinyML and demonstrate its benefits and architecture. Then, we investigate the meaning of quantization as a standard compression method for TinyML-related applications. There are two methods used to obtain the quantized weights of the deep learning models are quantization-aware training (QAT) and post-training quantization (PTQ), we described them in details. Next, TinyML-based solutions to improve the role of IoT devices in Smart Cities are highlighted as: lightweight training of deep learning models, inference of lightweight deep learning models in IoT devices, low power consumption, and inference of deep learning models in restricted resources of IoT devices. Finally, presenting some use cases for TinyML studies, with these studies applied to several cases in a variety of fields. To the best of the author’s knowledge, few studies have investigated TinyML as it is an emerging field.</p></div>