Accelerating deep neural networks for efficient scene understanding in automotive cyber-physical systems
This work addresses the need for efficient perception in automotive cyber-physical systems, but it appears incremental as it focuses on optimizing existing methods.
The paper tackled the problem of accelerating deep neural networks for real-time scene understanding in automotive systems by applying weight sharing techniques, achieving significant speed gains with minimal accuracy loss.
Automotive Cyber-Physical Systems (ACPS) have attracted a significant amount of interest in the past few decades, while one of the most critical operations in these systems is the perception of the environment. Deep learning and, especially, the use of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) provides impressive results in analyzing and understanding complex and dynamic scenes from visual data. The prediction horizons for those perception systems are very short and inference must often be performed in real time, stressing the need of transforming the original large pre-trained networks into new smaller models, by utilizing Model Compression and Acceleration (MCA) techniques. Our goal in this work is to investigate best practices for appropriately applying novel weight sharing techniques, optimizing the available variables and the training procedures towards the significant acceleration of widely adopted DNNs. Extensive evaluation studies carried out using various state-of-the-art DNN models in object detection and tracking experiments, provide details about the type of errors that manifest after the application of weight sharing techniques, resulting in significant acceleration gains with negligible accuracy losses.