Ahmet Soyyigit

Ahmet Soyyigit, Shuochao Yao, Heechul Yun

In this work, we present a novel scheduling framework enabling anytime perception for deep neural network (DNN) based 3D object detection pipelines. We focus on computationally expensive region proposal network (RPN) and per-category multi-head detector components, which are common in 3D object detection pipelines, and make them deadline-aware. We propose a scheduling algorithm, which intelligently selects the subset of the components to make effective time and accuracy trade-off on the fly. We minimize accuracy loss of skipping some of the neural network sub-components by projecting previously detected objects onto the current scene through estimations. We apply our approach to a state-of-art 3D object detection network, PointPillars, and evaluate its performance on Jetson Xavier AGX using nuScenes dataset. Compared to the baselines, our approach significantly improve the network's accuracy under various deadline constraints.

Ahmet Soyyigit, Shuochao Yao, Heechul Yun

This work addresses the challenge of adapting dynamic deadline requirements for LiDAR object detection deep neural networks (DNNs). The computing latency of object detection is critically important to ensure safe and efficient navigation. However, state-of-the-art LiDAR object detection DNNs often exhibit significant latency, hindering their real-time performance on resource-constrained edge platforms. Therefore, a tradeoff between detection accuracy and latency should be dynamically managed at runtime to achieve optimum results. In this paper, we introduce VALO (Versatile Anytime algorithm for LiDAR Object detection), a novel data-centric approach that enables anytime computing of 3D LiDAR object detection DNNs. VALO employs a deadline-aware scheduler to selectively process input regions, making execution time and accuracy tradeoffs without architectural modifications. Additionally, it leverages efficient forecasting of past detection results to mitigate possible loss of accuracy due to partial processing of input. Finally, it utilizes a novel input reduction technique within its detection heads to significantly accelerate execution without sacrificing accuracy. We implement VALO on state-of-the-art 3D LiDAR object detection networks, namely CenterPoint and VoxelNext, and demonstrate its dynamic adaptability to a wide range of time constraints while achieving higher accuracy than the prior state-of-the-art. Code is available athttps://github.com/CSL-KU/VALO}{github.com/CSL-KU/VALO.