CNN inference acceleration on limited resources FPGA platforms_epilepsy detection case study

Abstract

The use of a convolutional neural network (CNN) to analyze and classify electroencephalogram (EEG) signals has recently attracted the interest of researchers to identify epileptic seizures. This success has come with an enormous increase in the computational complexity and memory requirements of CNNs. For the sake of boosting the performance of CNN inference, several hardware accelerators have been proposed. The high performance and flexibility of the field programmable gate array (FPGA) make it an efficient accelerator for CNNs. Nevertheless, for resource-limited platforms, the deployment of CNN models poses significant challenges. For an ease of CNN implementation on such platforms, several tools and frameworks have been made available by the research community along with different optimization techniques. In this paper, we proposed an FPGA implementation for an automatic seizure detection approach using two CNN models, namely VGG-16 and ResNet-50. To reduce the model size and computation cost, we exploited two optimization approaches: pruning and quantization. Furthermore, we presented the results and discussed the advantages and limitations of two implementation alternatives for the inference acceleration of quantized CNNs on Zynq-7000: an advanced RISC machine (ARM) software implementation-based ARM, NN, software development kit (SDK) and a software/hardware implementation-based deep learning processor unit (DPU) accelerator and DNNDK toolkit.