Title
Irrelevant Pixels are Everywhere: Find and Exclude Them for More Efficient Computer Vision
Abstract
Computer vision is often performed using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). CNNs are compute-intensive and challenging to deploy on power-contrained systems such as mobile and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. CNNs are computeintensive because they indiscriminately compute many features on all pixels of the input image. We observe that, given a computer vision task, images often contain pixels that are irrelevant to the task. For example, if the task is looking for cars, pixels in the sky are not very useful. Therefore, we propose that a CNN be modified to only operate on relevant pixels to save computation and energy. We propose a method to study three popular computer vision datasets, finding that 48% of pixels are irrelevant. We also propose the focused convolution to modify a CNN's convolutional layers to reject the pixels that are marked irrelevant. On an embedded device, we observe no loss in accuracy, while inference latency, energy consumption, and multiply-add count are all reduced by about 45%.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/AICAS54282.2022.9870012
2022 IEEE 4th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Circuits and Systems (AICAS)
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
computer vision,low-power devices,embedded systems,datasets
Conference
978-1-6654-0997-1
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
4
Authors
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Caleb Tung132.80
Abhinav Goel222.08
Xiao Hu302.03
Nicholas Eliopoulos400.34
Emmanuel Amobi500.34
George K. Thiruvathukal600.34
Vipin Chaudhary700.34
Yung-Hsiang Lu82165161.51