<div>Convolution neural network is being used in field of autonomous driving vehicles or driver assistance systems (ADAS), and has achieved great success. Before the convolution neural network, traditional machine learning algorithms helped the driver assistance systems. Currently, there is a great exploration being done in architectures like MobileNet, SqueezeNext & SqueezeNet. It improved the CNN architectures and made it more suitable to implement on real-time embedded systems. </div><div> </div><div> This thesis proposes an efficient and a compact CNN to ameliorate the performance of existing CNN architectures. The intuition behind this proposed architecture is to supplant convolution layers with a more sophisticated block module and to develop a compact architecture with a competitive accuracy. Further, explores the bottleneck module and squeezenext basic block structure. The state-of-the-art squeezenext baseline architecture is used as a foundation to recreate and propose a high performance squeezenext architecture. The proposed architecture is further trained on the CIFAR-10 dataset from scratch. All the training and testing results are visualized with live loss and accuracy graphs. Focus of this thesis is to make an adaptable and a flexible model for efficient CNN performance which can perform better with the minimum tradeoff between model accuracy, size, and speed. Having a model size of 0.595MB along with accuracy of 92.60% and with a satisfactory training and validating speed of 9 seconds, this model can be deployed on real-time autonomous system platform such as Bluebox 2.0 by NXP.</div>

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Convolution neural network is being used in field of autonomous driving vehicles or driver assistance systems (ADAS), and has achieved great success. Before the convolution neural network, traditional machine learning algorithms helped the driver assistance systems. Currently, there is a great exploration being done in architectures like MobileNet, SqueezeNext & SqueezeNet. It improved the CNN architectures and made it more suitable to implement on real-time embedded systems. This thesis proposes an efficient and a compact CNN to ameliorate the performance of existing CNN architectures. The intuition behind this proposed architecture is to supplant convolution layers with a more sophisticated block module and to develop a compact architecture with a competitive accuracy. Further, explores the bottleneck module and squeezenext basic block structure. The state-of-the-art squeezenext baseline architecture is used as a foundation to recreate and propose a high performance squeezenext architecture. The proposed architecture is further trained on the CIFAR-10 dataset from scratch. All the training and testing results are visualized with live loss and accuracy graphs. Focus of this thesis is to make an adaptable and a flexible model for efficient CNN performance which can perform better with the minimum tradeoff between model accuracy, size, and speed. Having a model size of 0.595MB along with accuracy of 92.60% and with a satisfactory training and validating speed of 9 seconds, this model can be deployed on real-time autonomous system platform such as Bluebox 2.0 by NXP.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The word “Perception” seems to be intuitive and maybe the most straightforward problem for the human brain because as a child we have been trained to classify images, detect objects, but for computers, it can be a daunting task. Giving intuition and reasoning to a computer which has mere capabilities to accept commands and process those commands is a big challenge. However, recent leaps in hardware development, sophisticated software frameworks, and mathematical techniques have made it a little less daunting if not easy. There are various applications built around to the concept of “Perception”. These applications require substantial computational resources, expensive hardware, and some sophisticated software frameworks. Building an application for perception for the embedded system is an entirely different ballgame. Embedded system is a culmination of hardware, software and peripherals developed for specific tasks with imposed constraints on memory and power. Therefore, the applications developed should keep in mind the memory and power constraints imposed due to the nature of these systems. Before 2012, the problems related to “Perception” such as classification, object detection were solved using algorithms with manually engineered features. However, in recent years, instead of manually engineering the features, these features are learned through learning algorithms. The game-changing architecture of Convolution Neural Networks proposed in 2012 by Alex K [1], provided a tremendous momentum in the direction of pushing Neural networks for perception. This thesis is an attempt to develop a convolution neural network architecture for embedded systems, i.e. an architecture that has a small model size and competitive accuracy. Recreate state-of-the-art architectures using fire module’s concept to reduce the model size of the architecture. The proposed compact models are feasible for deployment on embedded devices such as the Bluebox 2.0. Furthermore, attempts are made to integrate the compact Convolution Neural Network with object detection pipelines.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Humans can visually see things and can differentiate objects easily but for computers, it is not that easy. Computer Vision is an interdisciplinary field that allows computers to comprehend, from digital videos and images, and differentiate objects. With the Introduction to CNNs/DNNs, computer vision is tremendously used in applications like ADAS, robotics and autonomous systems, etc. This thesis aims to propose an architecture, RMNv2, that is well suited for computer vision applications such as ADAS, etc. RMNv2 is inspired by its original architecture Mobilenet V2. It is a modified version of Mobilenet V2. It includes changes like disabling downsample layers, Heterogeneous kernel-based convolutions, mish activation, and auto augmentation. The proposed model is trained from scratch in the CIFAR10 dataset and produced an accuracy of 92.4% with a total number of parameters of 1.06M. The results indicate that the proposed model has a model size of 4.3MB which is like a 52.2% decrease from its original implementation. Due to its less size and competitive accuracy the proposed model can be easily deployed in resource-constrained devices like mobile and embedded devices for applications like ADAS etc. Further, the proposed model is also implemented in real-time embedded devices like NXP Bluebox 2.0 and NXP i.MX RT1060 for image classification tasks.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Computer vision is a domain which deals with the goal of making technology as efficient as human vision. To achieve that goal, after decades of research, researchers have developed algorithms that are able to work efficiently on resource constrained hardware like mobile or embedded devices for computer vision applications. Due to their constant efforts, such devices have become capable for tasks like Image Classification, Object Detection, Object Recognition, Semantic Segmentation, and many other applications. Autonomous systems like self-driving cars, Drones and UAVs, are being successfully developed because of these advances in AI. Deep Learning, a part of AI, is a specific domain of Machine Learning which focuses on developing algorithms for such applications. Deep Learning deals with tasks like extracting features from raw image data, replacing pipelines of specialized models with single end-to-end models, making models usable for multiple tasks with superior performance. A major focus is on techniques to detect and extract features which provide better context for inference about an image or video stream. A deep hierarchy of rich features can be learned and automatically extracted from images, provided by the multiple deep layers of CNN models. CNNs are the backbone of Computer Vision. The reason that CNNs are the focus of attention for deep learning models is that they were specifically designed for image data. They are complicated but very effective in extracting features from an image or a video stream. After AlexNet won the ILSVRC in 2012, there was a drastic increase in research related with CNNs. Many state-of-the-art architectures like VGG Net, GoogleNet, ResNet, Inception-v4, Inception-Resnet-v2, ShuffleNet, Xception, MobileNet, MobileNetV2, SqueezeNet, SqueezeNext and many more were introduced. The trend behind the research depicts an increase in the number of layers of CNN to make them more efficient but with that, the size of the model increased as well. This problem was fixed with the advent of new algorithms which resulted in a decrease in model size. As a result, today we have CNN models, which are implemented on mobile devices. These mobile models are compact and have low latency, which in turn reduces the computational cost of the embedded system. This thesis resembles similar idea, it proposes two new CNN architectures, A-MnasNet and R-MnasNet, which have been derived from MnasNet by Design Space Exploration. These architectures outperform MnasNet in terms of model size and accuracy. They have been trained and tested on CIFAR-10 dataset. Furthermore, they were implemented on NXP Bluebox 2.0, an autonomous driving platform, for Image Classification.

Humans can visually see things and can differentiate objects easily but for computers, it is not that easy. Computer Vision is an interdisciplinary field that allows computers to comprehend, from digital videos and images, and differentiate objects. With the Introduction to CNNs/DNNs, computer vision is tremendously used in applications like ADAS, robotics and autonomous systems, etc. This thesis aims to propose an architecture, RMNv2, that is well suited for computer vision applications such as ADAS, etc.<br><div>RMNv2 is inspired by its original architecture Mobilenet V2. It is a modified version of Mobilenet V2. It includes changes like disabling downsample layers, Heterogeneous kernel-based convolutions, mish activation, and auto augmentation. The proposed model is trained from scratch in the CIFAR10 dataset and produced an accuracy of 92.4% with a total number of parameters of 1.06M. The results indicate that the proposed model has a model size of 4.3MB which is like a 52.2% decrease from its original implementation. Due to its less size and competitive accuracy the proposed model can be easily deployed in resource-constrained devices like mobile and embedded devices for applications like ADAS etc. Further, the proposed model is also implemented in real-time embedded devices like NXP Bluebox 2.0 and NXP i.MX RT1060 for image classification tasks. <br></div>

The word “Perception” seems to be intuitive and maybe the most straightforward problem for the human brain because as a child we have been trained to classify images, detect objects, but for computers, it can be a daunting task. Giving intuition and reasoning to a computer which has mere capabilities to accept commands and process those commands is a big challenge. However, recent leaps in hardware development, sophisticated software frameworks, and mathematical techniques have made it a little less daunting if not easy. There are various applications built around to the concept of “Perception”. These applications require substantial computational resources, expensive hardware, and some sophisticated software frameworks. Building an application for perception for the embedded system is an entirely different ballgame. Embedded system is a culmination of hardware, software and peripherals developed for specific tasks with imposed constraints on memory and power. Therefore, the applications developed should keep in mind the memory and power constraints imposed due to the nature of these systems.Before 2012, the problems related to “Perception” such as classification, object detection were solved using algorithms with manually engineered features. However, in recent years, instead of manually engineering the features, these features are learned through learning algorithms. The game-changing architecture of Convolution Neural Networks proposed in 2012 by Alex K, provided a tremendous momentum in the direction of pushing Neural networks for perception. This thesis is an attempt to develop a convolution neural network architecture for embedded systems, i.e. an architecture that has a small model size and competitive accuracy. Recreate state-of-the-art architectures using fire module’s concept to reduce the model size of the architecture. The proposed compact models are feasible for deployment on embedded devices such as the Bluebox 2.0. Furthermore, attempts are made to integrate the compact Convolution Neural Network with object detection pipelines.