FitNN: A Low-Resource FPGA-Based CNN Accelerator for Drones

Executing deep neural networks (DNNs) on resource-constraint edge devices, such as drones, offers low inference latency, high data privacy, and reduced network traffic. However, deploying DNNs on such devices is a challenging task. During DNN inference, intermediate results require significant data movement and frequent off-chip memory (DRAM) access, which decreases the inference speed and power efficiency. To address this issue, this article presents a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based convolutional neural network (CNN) accelerator, named FitNN, which improves the speed and power efficiency of CNN inference by reducing data movements. FitNN adopts a pretrained CNN of iSmart2, which is composed of depthwise and pointwise blocks in the Mobilenet structure. A cross-layer dataflow strategy is proposed to reduce off-chip data transfer of feature maps. Also, multilevel buffers are proposed to keep the most needed data on-chip (in block RAM) and avoid off-chip data reorganization and reloading. Finally, a computation core is proposed to operate the depthwise, pointwise, and max-pooling computation as soon as the data arrive without reorganization, which suits the real-life scenario of the data arriving in sequence. In our experiment, FitNN is implemented on two FPGA-based platforms (both at 150 MHz), Ultra96-V2 and PYNQ-Z1, for drone-based object detection with batch size = 1. The results show that FitNN achieves 15 frames per second (FPS) on Ultra96-V2, with power consumption of 4.69 W. On PYNQ-Z1, FitNN achieves 9 FPS with 1.9 W of power consumption. Compared with the previous FPGA-based implementation of iSmart2 CNN, FitNN increases the efficiency (FPS/W) by 2.37 times.