On Design and Optimization of Convolutional Neural Network for Embedded Systems

This work presents the research on optimizing neural networks and deploying them for real-time practical applications. We analyze different optimization methods, namely binarization, separable convolution and pruning. We implement each method for the application of vehicle classification and we empirically evaluate and analyze the results. The objective is to make large neural networks suitable for real-time applications by reducing the computation requirements through these optimization approaches. The data set is of vehicles from 4 classes of vehicle types, and a convolutional model was used to solve the problem initially. Our results show that these optimization methods offer many performance benefits in this application in terms of reduced execution time (by up to 5 ×), reduced model storage requirements, with out largely impacting accuracy, making them a suitable tool for use in streamlining heavy neural networks to be used on resource-constrained envrionments. The platforms used in the research are a desktop platform, and two embedded platforms