Jie Zheng

Qing Qin, Jie Ren, Jialong Yu et al.

The recent advances in deep neural networks (DNNs) make them attractive for embedded systems. However, it can take a long time for DNNs to make an inference on resource-constrained computing devices. Model compression techniques can address the computation issue of deep inference on embedded devices. This technique is highly attractive, as it does not rely on specialized hardware, or computation-offloading that is often infeasible due to privacy concerns or high latency. However, it remains unclear how model compression techniques perform across a wide range of DNNs. To design efficient embedded deep learning solutions, we need to understand their behaviors. This work develops a quantitative approach to characterize model compression techniques on a representative embedded deep learning architecture, the NVIDIA Jetson Tx2. We perform extensive experiments by considering 11 influential neural network architectures from the image classification and the natural language processing domains. We experimentally show that how two mainstream compression techniques, data quantization and pruning, perform on these network architectures and the implications of compression techniques to the model storage size, inference time, energy consumption and performance metrics. We demonstrate that there are opportunities to achieve fast deep inference on embedded systems, but one must carefully choose the compression settings. Our results provide insights on when and how to apply model compression techniques and guidelines for designing efficient embedded deep learning systems.

Shenghua He, Jie Zheng, Akiko Maehara et al.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) can provide high-resolution cross-sectional images for analyzing superficial plaques in coronary arteries. Commonly, plaque characterization using intra-coronary OCT images is performed manually by expert observers. This manual analysis is time consuming and its accuracy heavily relies on the experience of human observers. Traditional machine learning based methods, such as the least squares support vector machine and random forest methods, have been recently employed to automatically characterize plaque regions in OCT images. Several processing steps, including feature extraction, informative feature selection, and final pixel classification, are commonly used in these traditional methods. Therefore, the final classification accuracy can be jeopardized by error or inaccuracy within each of these steps. In this study, we proposed a convolutional neural network (CNN) based method to automatically characterize plaques in OCT images. Unlike traditional methods, our method uses the image as a direct input and performs classification as a single-step process. The experiments on 269 OCT images showed that the average prediction accuracy of CNN-based method was 0.866, which indicated a great promise for clinical translation.