FPGA-based Low Power Acceleration of HARK Sound Source Localization

This paper presents an FPGA-based low-power acceleration of sound source localization in HARK, open-source software for robot audition. Due to the massive matrix operations, sound source localization in HARK takes substantial processing time in edge computing devices. To balance processing time and low power consumption, two functions in sound source localization that include many matrix operations are targeted and migrated on an FPGA SoC board called M-KUBOS. Compared to CPU-based computing on ARM Cortex A53, our implementation achieved a 2.0× speedup and 1.7× lower energy consumption.