Squeezed Edge YOLO: Onboard Object Detection on Edge Devices
This addresses the challenge of efficient onboard object detection for autonomous navigation on edge devices, representing an incremental improvement with specific optimizations.
The paper tackles the problem of deploying object detection models like YOLO on resource-constrained edge devices by introducing Squeezed Edge YOLO, a compressed model optimized to kilobytes, resulting in an 8x reduction in model size, 76% improvement in energy efficiency, and 3.3x faster throughput.
Demand for efficient onboard object detection is increasing due to its key role in autonomous navigation. However, deploying object detection models such as YOLO on resource constrained edge devices is challenging due to the high computational requirements of such models. In this paper, an compressed object detection model named Squeezed Edge YOLO is examined. This model is compressed and optimized to kilobytes of parameters in order to fit onboard such edge devices. To evaluate Squeezed Edge YOLO, two use cases - human and shape detection - are used to show the model accuracy and performance. Moreover, the model is deployed onboard a GAP8 processor with 8 RISC-V cores and an NVIDIA Jetson Nano with 4GB of memory. Experimental results show Squeezed Edge YOLO model size is optimized by a factor of 8x which leads to 76% improvements in energy efficiency and 3.3x faster throughout.