F-CNN: Faster CNN Exploiting Data Re-Use with Statistical Analysis

Many of the current edge computing devices need efficient implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications due to strict latency, security and power requirements. Nonetheless, such devices, face various challenges when executing AI applications due to their limited computing and energy resources. In particular, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) is a popular machine learning method that derives a high-level function from being trained on various visual input examples. This paper contributes to enabling the use of CNN on resource-constrained devices offline, where a trade-off between accuracy, running time and power efficiency is verified. The paper investigates the use of minimum pre-processing methods of input data to identify nonessential computations in the convolutional layers. In this work, Spatial locality of input data is considered along with an efficient pre-processing method to mitigate the accuracy loss caused by the computational re-use approach. This technique was tested on LeNet and CIFAR-10 structures and was responsible for 1.9% and 1.6% accuracy loss while reducing the processing time by 38.3% and 20.9% and reducing the energy by 38.3%, and 20.7%, respectively. The models were deployed and verified on Raspberry Pi 4 B platform using the MATLAB coder to measure time and energy.