QuantYOLO: A High-Throughput and Power-Efficient Object Detection Network for Resource and Power Constrained UAVs

Muhammad Gohar Javed, Minahil Raza, Muhammad Mohsin Ghaffar, Christian Weis, Norbert Wehn, Muhammad Shahzad, Faisal Shafait

Abstract: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are producing state-of-the-art results in the object detection field. However, deep topologies of CNN are computationally intensive and typically require excessive resources (i.e. high-end GPUs), which hinder their deployment on resource and power constrained UAVs. In this work, we present a high-throughput and power efficient quantized object detection network, QuantYOLO, which is based on the Tiny-YOLOv2 topology. We conduct a detailed exploration of precision and filter pruning vs. accuracy, throughput and power consumption trade-off for the object detection task. As a result of these explorations, we select a network with binarized weights and 4-bit activations (except the output layer), which is 21.8× smaller than the Tiny-YOLOv2 achieving a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 51.5% on the PASCAL-VOC dataset. Finally, we present an FPGA based accelerator, which achieves 1.6× higher throughput (FPS) and is 3.1× more power efficient as compared to prior FPGA architectures.