Survey on Computer Vision Techniques for Internet-of-Things Devices

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are state-of-the-art techniques for solving most computer vision problems. DNNs require billions of parameters and operations to achieve state-of-the-art results. This requirement makes DNNs extremely compute, memory, and energy-hungry, and consequently difficult to deploy on small battery-powered Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices with limited computing resources. Deployment of DNNs on Internet-of-Things devices, such as traffic cameras, can improve public safety by enabling applications such as automatic accident detection and emergency response. Through this paper, we survey the recent advances in low-power and energy-efficient DNN implementations that improve the deployability of DNNs without significantly sacrificing accuracy. In general, these techniques either reduce the memory requirements, the number of arithmetic operations, or both. The techniques can be divided into three major categories: (1) neural network compression, (2) network architecture search and design, and (3) compiler and graph optimizations. In this paper, we survey both low-power techniques for both convolutional and transformer DNNs, and summarize the advantages, disadvantages, and open research problems.