A Full Featured Configurable Accelerator for Object Detection With YOLO

Object detection and classification is an essential task of computer vision. A very efficient algorithm for detection and classification is YOLO (You Look Only Once). We consider hardware architectures to run YOLO in real-time on embedded platforms. Designing a new dedicated accelerator for each new version of YOLO is not feasible given the fast delivery of new versions. This work's primary goal is to design a configurable and scalable core for creating specific object detection and classification systems based on YOLO, targeting embedded platforms. The core accelerates the execution of all the algorithm steps, including pre-processing, model inference and post-processing. It considers a fixed-point format, linearised activation functions, batch-normalisation, folding, and a hardware structure that exploits most of the available parallelism in CNN processing. The proposed core is configured for real-time execution of YOLOv3-Tiny and YOLOv4-Tiny, integrated into a RISC-V-based system-on-chip architecture and prototyped in an UltraScale XCKU040 FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). The solution achieves a performance of 32 and 31 frames per second for YOLOv3-Tiny and YOLOv4-Tiny, respectively, with a 16-bit fixed-point format. Compared to previous proposals, it improves the frame rate at a higher performance efficiency. The performance, area efficiency and configurability of the proposed core enable the fast development of real-time YOLO-based object detectors on embedded systems.