<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) / Developing intelligent agents that can perceive and understand the rich visualworld around us has been a long-standing goal in the field of AI. Recently, asignificant progress has been made by the CNNs/DNNs to the incredible advances& in a wide range of applications such as ADAS, intelligent cameras surveillance,autonomous systems, drones, & robots. Design space exploration (DSE) of NNs andother techniques have made CNN/DNN memory & computationally efficient. Butthe major design hurdles for deployment are limited resources such as computation,memory, energy efficiency, and power budget. DSE of small DNN architectures forADAS emerged with better and efficient architectures such as baseline SqueezeNetand SqueezeNext. These architectures are exclusively known for their small modelsize, good model speed & model accuracy.In this thesis study, two new DNN architectures are proposed. Before diving intothe proposed architectures, DSE of DNNs explores the methods to improveDNNs/CNNs.Further, understanding the different hyperparameters tuning &experimenting with various optimizers and newly introduced methodologies. First,High Performance SqueezeNext architecture ameliorate the performance of existingDNN architectures. The intuition behind this proposed architecture is to supplantconvolution layers with a more sophisticated block module & to develop a compactand efficient architecture with a competitive accuracy. Second, Shallow SqueezeNextarchitecture is proposed which achieves better model size results in comparison tobaseline SqueezeNet and SqueezeNext is presented. It illustrates the architecture is xviicompact, efficient and flexible in terms of model size and accuracy.Thestate-of-the-art SqueezeNext baseline and SqueezeNext baseline are used as thefoundation to recreate and propose the both DNN architectures in this study. Dueto very small model size with competitive model accuracy and decent model testingspeed it is expected to perform well on the ADAS systems.The proposedarchitectures are trained and tested from scratch on CIFAR-10 [30] & CIFAR-100[34] datasets. All the training and testing results are visualized with live loss andaccuracy graphs by using livelossplot. In the last, both of the proposed DNNarchitectures are deployed on BlueBox2.0 by NXP.

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.

<div>An Autonomous vehicle depends on the combination of latest technology or the ADAS safety features such as Adaptive cruise control (ACC), Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB), Automatic Parking, Blind Spot Monitor, Forward Collision Warning or Avoidance (FCW or FCA), Lane Departure Warning. The current trend follows incorporation of these technologies using the Artificial neural network or Deep neural network, as an imitation of the traditionally used algorithms. Recent research in the field of deep learning and development of competent processors for autonomous or self driving car have shown amplitude of prospect, but there are many complexities for hardware deployment because of limited resources such as memory, computational power, and energy. Deployment of several mentioned ADAS safety feature using multiple sensors and individual processors, increases the integration complexity and also results in the distribution of the system, which is very pivotal for autonomous vehicles.</div><div><br></div><div>This thesis attempts to tackle two important adas safety feature: Forward collision Warning, and Object Detection using the machine learning and Deep Neural Networks and there deployment in the autonomous embedded platform.</div><div><br></div><div><div>This thesis proposes the following: </div><div>1. A machine learning based approach for the forward collision warning system in an autonomous vehicle.<br></div><div>2.3-D object detection using Lidar and Camera which is primarily based on Lidar Point Clouds. </div><div><br></div><div>The proposed forward collision warning model is based on the forward facing automotive radar providing the sensed input values such as acceleration, velocity and separation distance to a classifier algorithm which on the basis of supervised learning model, alerts the driver of possible collision. Decision Tress, Linear Regression, Support Vector Machine, Stochastic Gradient Descent, and a Fully Connected Neural Network is used for the prediction purpose.</div><div><br></div><div>The second proposed methods uses object detection architecture, which combines the 2D object detectors and a contemporary 3D deep learning techniques. For this approach, the 2D object detectors is used first, which proposes a 2D bounding box on the images or video frames. Additionally a 3D object detection technique is used where the point clouds are instance segmented and based on raw point clouds density a 3D bounding box is predicted across the previously segmented objects.</div></div>

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>

<p>In recent years, deep learning models have become popular in the real-time embedded application, but there are many complexities for hardware deployment because of limited resources such as memory, computational power, and energy. Recent research in the field of deep learning focuses on reducing the model size of the Convolution Neural Network (CNN) by various compression techniques like Architectural compression, Pruning, Quantization, and Encoding (e.g., Huffman encoding). Network pruning is one of the promising technique to solve these problems.</p> <p>This thesis proposes methods to prune the convolution neural network (SqueezeNet) without introducing network sparsity in the pruned model. </p> <p>This thesis proposes three methods to prune the CNN to decrease the model size of CNN without a significant drop in the accuracy of the model.</p> <p>1: Pruning based on Taylor expansion of change in cost function Delta C.</p> <p>2: Pruning based on L₂ normalization of activation maps.</p> <p>3: Pruning based on a combination of method 1 and method 2.</p><p>The proposed methods use various ranking methods to rank the convolution kernels and prune the lower ranked filters afterwards SqueezeNet model is fine-tuned by backpropagation. Transfer learning technique is used to train the SqueezeNet on the CIFAR-10 dataset. Results show that the proposed approach reduces the SqueezeNet model by 72% without a significant drop in the accuracy of the model (optimal pruning efficiency result). Results also show that Pruning based on a combination of Taylor expansion of the cost function and L₂ normalization of activation maps achieves better pruning efficiency compared to other individual pruning criteria and most of the pruned kernels are from mid and high-level layers. The Pruned model is deployed on BlueBox 2.0 using RTMaps software and model performance was evaluated.</p><p></p>

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / In recent years, deep learning models have become popular in the real-time embedded application, but there are many complexities for hardware deployment because of limited resources such as memory, computational power, and energy. Recent research in the field of deep learning focuses on reducing the model size of the Convolution Neural Network (CNN) by various compression techniques like Architectural compression, Pruning, Quantization, and Encoding (e.g., Huffman encoding). Network pruning is one of the promising technique to solve these problems. This thesis proposes methods to prune the convolution neural network (SqueezeNet) without introducing network sparsity in the pruned model. This thesis proposes three methods to prune the CNN to decrease the model size of CNN without a significant drop in the accuracy of the model. 1: Pruning based on Taylor expansion of change in cost function Delta C. 2: Pruning based on L2 normalization of activation maps. 3: Pruning based on a combination of method 1 and method 2. The proposed methods use various ranking methods to rank the convolution kernels and prune the lower ranked filters afterwards SqueezeNet model is fine-tuned by backpropagation. Transfer learning technique is used to train the SqueezeNet on the CIFAR-10 dataset. Results show that the proposed approach reduces the SqueezeNet model by 72% without a significant drop in the accuracy of the model (optimal pruning efficiency result). Results also show that Pruning based on a combination of Taylor expansion of the cost function and L2 normalization of activation maps achieves better pruning efficiency compared to other individual pruning criteria and most of the pruned kernels are from mid and high-level layers. The Pruned model is deployed on BlueBox 2.0 using RTMaps software and model performance was evaluated.