PhiNets: A Scalable Backbone for Low-power AI at the Edge

Francesco Paissan, Alberto Ancilotto, Elisabetta Farella

Abstract: In the Internet of Things era, where we see many interconnected and heterogeneous mobile and fixed smart devices, distributing the intelligence from the cloud to the edge has become a necessity. Due to limited computational and communication capabilities, low memory and limited energy budget, bringing artificial intelligence algorithms to peripheral devices, such as end-nodes of a sensor network, is a challenging task and requires the design of innovative solutions. In this work, we present PhiNets, a new scalable backbone optimized for deep-learning-based image processing on resource-constrained platforms. PhiNets are based on inverted residual blocks specifically designed to decouple the computational cost, working memory, and parameter memory, thus exploiting all available resources for a given platform. With a YoloV2 detection head and Simple Online and Realtime Tracking (SORT), the proposed architecture achieves state-of-the-art results in (i) detection on the COCO and VOC2012 benchmarks, and (ii) tracking on the MOT15 benchmark. PhiNets obtain a reduction in parameter count of around 90% with respect to previous state-of-the-art models (EfficientNetv1, MobileNetv2) and achieve better performance with lower computational cost. Moreover, we demonstrate our approach on a prototype node based on an STM32H743 microcontroller (MCU) with 2 MB of internal Flash and 1MB of RAM and achieve power requirements in the order of 10 mW. The code for the PhiNets is publicly available on GitHub.1