FPGA Implementation of Reduced Precision Convolutional Neural Networks
The University of Texas at Dallas
The University of Texas at Dallas, 2019
@phdthesis{nabil2018fpga,
title={FPGA Implementation of Reduced Precision Convolutional Neural Networks},
author={Nabil, Muhammad Mohid},
year={2018}
}
With the improvement in processing systems, machine learning applications are finding widespread use in almost all sectors of technology. Image recognition is one application of machine learning which has become widely popular with various architectures and systems aimed at improving recognition performance. With classification accuracy now approaching saturation point, many researchers are now focusing on resource and energy efficiency. With the increased demand for learning applications in embedded devices, it is of paramount importance to optimize power and energy consumption to increase utility in these low power embedded systems. In recent months, reduced precision neural networks have caught the attention of some researchers. Reduced data width deep nets offer the potential of saving valuable resources on hardware platforms. In turn, these hardware platforms such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) offer the potential of a low power system with massive parallelism increasing throughput and performance. In this research, we explore the implementations of a deep learning architecture on FPGA in the presence of resource and energy constraints. We study reduced precision neural networks and implement one such architecture as a proof of concept. We focus on binarized convolutional neural network and its implementation on FPGAs. Binarized convolutional nets have displayed a classification accuracy of up to 88% with some smaller image sets such as CIFAR-10. This number is on the rise with some of the new architectures. We study the tradeoff between architecture depth and its impact on accuracy to get a better understanding of the convolutional layers and their impact on the overall performance. This is done from a hardware perspective giving us better insight enabling better resource allocation on FPGA fabric. Zynq ZCU-102 has been used for accelerator implementation. High level synthesis tool (Vivado HLS) from Xilinx is used for CNN definition on FPGA fabric.
May 12, 2019 by hgpu
