Browsing by Subject "BlueBox"

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    Design Space Exploration of DNNs for Autonomous Systems
    (2019-08) Duggal, Jayan Kant; El-Sharkawy, Mohamed; King, Brian; Rizkalla, Maher
    Developing intelligent agents that can perceive and understand the rich visualworld around us has been a long-standing goal in the field of AI. Recently, asignificant progress has been made by the CNNs/DNNs to the incredible advances& in a wide range of applications such as ADAS, intelligent cameras surveillance,autonomous systems, drones, & robots. Design space exploration (DSE) of NNs andother techniques have made CNN/DNN memory & computationally efficient. Butthe major design hurdles for deployment are limited resources such as computation,memory, energy efficiency, and power budget. DSE of small DNN architectures forADAS emerged with better and efficient architectures such as baseline SqueezeNetand SqueezeNext. These architectures are exclusively known for their small modelsize, good model speed & model accuracy.In this thesis study, two new DNN architectures are proposed. Before diving intothe proposed architectures, DSE of DNNs explores the methods to improveDNNs/CNNs.Further, understanding the different hyperparameters tuning &experimenting with various optimizers and newly introduced methodologies. First,High Performance SqueezeNext architecture ameliorate the performance of existingDNN architectures. The intuition behind this proposed architecture is to supplantconvolution layers with a more sophisticated block module & to develop a compactand efficient architecture with a competitive accuracy. Second, Shallow SqueezeNextarchitecture is proposed which achieves better model size results in comparison tobaseline SqueezeNet and SqueezeNext is presented. It illustrates the architecture is xviicompact, efficient and flexible in terms of model size and accuracy.Thestate-of-the-art SqueezeNext baseline and SqueezeNext baseline are used as thefoundation to recreate and propose the both DNN architectures in this study. Dueto very small model size with competitive model accuracy and decent model testingspeed it is expected to perform well on the ADAS systems.The proposedarchitectures are trained and tested from scratch on CIFAR-10 [30] & CIFAR-100[34] datasets. All the training and testing results are visualized with live loss andaccuracy graphs by using livelossplot. In the last, both of the proposed DNNarchitectures are deployed on BlueBox2.0 by NXP.
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    Pruning Convolution Neural Network (SqueezeNet) for Efficient Hardware Deployment
    (2018-12) Gaikwad, Akash S.; El-Sharkawy, Mohamed; Rizkalla, Maher; King, Brian
    In recent years, deep learning models have become popular in the real-time embedded application, but there are many complexities for hardware deployment because of limited resources such as memory, computational power, and energy. Recent research in the field of deep learning focuses on reducing the model size of the Convolution Neural Network (CNN) by various compression techniques like Architectural compression, Pruning, Quantization, and Encoding (e.g., Huffman encoding). Network pruning is one of the promising technique to solve these problems. This thesis proposes methods to prune the convolution neural network (SqueezeNet) without introducing network sparsity in the pruned model. This thesis proposes three methods to prune the CNN to decrease the model size of CNN without a significant drop in the accuracy of the model. 1: Pruning based on Taylor expansion of change in cost function Delta C. 2: Pruning based on L2 normalization of activation maps. 3: Pruning based on a combination of method 1 and method 2. The proposed methods use various ranking methods to rank the convolution kernels and prune the lower ranked filters afterwards SqueezeNet model is fine-tuned by backpropagation. Transfer learning technique is used to train the SqueezeNet on the CIFAR-10 dataset. Results show that the proposed approach reduces the SqueezeNet model by 72% without a significant drop in the accuracy of the model (optimal pruning efficiency result). Results also show that Pruning based on a combination of Taylor expansion of the cost function and L2 normalization of activation maps achieves better pruning efficiency compared to other individual pruning criteria and most of the pruned kernels are from mid and high-level layers. The Pruned model is deployed on BlueBox 2.0 using RTMaps software and model performance was evaluated.