An FPGA-Based Resource-Saving Hardware Accelerator for Deep Neural Network

With the development of computer vision researches, due to the state-of-the-art performance on image and video processing tasks, deep neural network (DNN) has been widely applied in various applications (autonomous vehicles, weather forecasting, counter-terrorism, surveillance, traffic management, etc.). However, to achieve such performance, DNN models have become increasingly complicated and deeper, and result in heavy computational stress. Thus, it is not sufficient for the general central processing unit (CPU) processors to meet the real-time application requirements. To deal with this bottleneck, research based on hardware acceleration solution for DNN attracts great attention. Specifically, to meet various real-life applications, DNN acceleration solutions mainly focus on issue of hardware acceleration with intense memory and calculation resource. In this paper, a novel resource-saving architecture based on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is proposed. Due to the novel designed processing element (PE), the proposed architecture achieves good performance with the extremely limited calculating resource. The on-chip buffer allocation helps enhance resource-saving performance on memory. Moreover, the accelerator improves its performance by exploiting the sparsity property of the input feature map. Compared to other state-of-the-art solutions based on FPGA, our architecture achieves good performance, with quite limited resource consumption, thus fully meet the requirement of real-time applications.