This work presents CascadeCNN, an automated toolflow that pushes the quantisation limits of any given CNN model, aiming to perform high-throughput inference. A two-stage architecture tailored for any given CNN-FPGA pair is generated, consisting of a low- and high-precision unit in a cascade. A confidence evaluation unit is employed to identify misclassified cases from the excessively low-precision unit and forward them to the high-precision unit for re-processing. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed toolflow can achieve a performance boost up to 55 for VGG-16 and 48 for AlexNet over the baseline design for the same resource budget and accuracy, without the need of retraining the model or accessing the training data.
Cascades of classifiers is a widely studied design approach in machine learning @cite_14 @cite_2 . Such algorithms aim to minimise the computation time per classification by exploiting the property that different inputs require different amount of computation to obtain a confident prediction. A cascade structure is typically formed by connecting classifiers of increasing complexity as a multi-stage architecture. At each stage, based on the confidence of its prediction, a classifier can either decide upon the classification of the current input sample and terminate the execution or pass it to the next stage. The deep learning community has mainly focused on the design of CNN cascades from an algorithmic perspective targeting diverse tasks including the detection of faces @cite_9 , pedestrians @cite_6 and objects @cite_20 . In a more systems-oriented approach, @cite_22 proposed , an automated framework that generates CNN cascades optimised for high-throughput query-based video analysis on high-end GPUs, by searching the design space of both CNN models and cascade structures with the objective to perform binary classification tasks.
@cite_14 @cite_22 @cite_9 @cite_6 @cite_2 @cite_20
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This paper proposes a fast and reliable method for anomaly detection and localization in video data showing crowded scenes. Time-efficient anomaly localization is an ongoing challenge and subject of this paper. We propose a cubic-patch-based method, characterised by a cascade of classifiers, which makes use of an advanced feature-learning approach. Our cascade of classifiers has two main stages. First, a light but deep 3D auto-encoder is used for early identification of “many” normal cubic patches. This deep network operates on small cubic patches as being the first stage, before carefully resizing the remaining candidates of interest, and evaluating those at the second stage using a more complex and deeper 3D convolutional neural network (CNN). We divide the deep auto-encoder and the CNN into multiple sub-stages, which operate as cascaded classifiers. Shallow layers of the cascaded deep networks (designed as Gaussian classifiers, acting as weak single-class classifiers) detect “simple” normal patches, such as background patches and more complex normal patches, are detected at deeper layers. It is shown that the proposed novel technique (a cascade of two cascaded classifiers) performs comparable to current top-performing detection and localization methods on standard benchmarks, but outperforms those in general with respect to required computation time. The problem of learning classifier cascades is considered. A new cascade boosting algorithm, fast cascade boosting (FCBoost), is proposed. FCBoost is shown to have a number of interesting properties, namely that it 1) minimizes a Lagrangian risk that jointly accounts for classification accuracy and speed, 2) generalizes adaboost, 3) can be made cost-sensitive to support the design of high detection rate cascades, and 4) is compatible with many predictor structures suitable for sequential decision making. It is shown that a rich family of such structures can be derived recursively from cascade predictors of two stages, denoted cascade generators. Generators are then proposed for two new cascade families, last-stage and multiplicative cascades, that generalize the two most popular cascade architectures in the literature. The concept of neutral predictors is finally introduced, enabling FCBoost to automatically determine the cascade configuration, i.e., number of stages and number of weak learners per stage, for the learned cascades. Experiments on face and pedestrian detection show that the resulting cascades outperform current state-of-the-art methods in both detection accuracy and speed. A cascade face detector uses a sequence of node classifiers to distinguish faces from nonfaces. This paper presents a new approach to design node classifiers in the cascade detector. Previous methods used machine learning algorithms that simultaneously select features and form ensemble classifiers. We argue that if these two parts are decoupled, we have the freedom to design a classifier that explicitly addresses the difficulties caused by the asymmetric learning goal. There are three contributions in this paper: The first is a categorization of asymmetries in the learning goal and why they make face detection hard. The second is the forward feature selection (FFS) algorithm and a fast precomputing strategy for AdaBoost. FFS and the fast AdaBoost can reduce the training time by approximately 100 and 50 times, in comparison to a naive implementation of the AdaBoost feature selection method. The last contribution is a linear asymmetric classifier (LAC), a classifier that explicitly handles the asymmetric learning goal as a well-defined constrained optimization problem. We demonstrated experimentally that LAC results in an improved ensemble classifier performance. The design of complexity-aware cascaded detectors, combining features of very different complexities, is considered. A new cascade design procedure is introduced, by formulating cascade learning as the Lagrangian optimization of a risk that accounts for both accuracy and complexity. A boosting algorithm, denoted as complexity aware cascade training (CompACT), is then derived to solve this optimization. CompACT cascades are shown to seek an optimal trade-off between accuracy and complexity by pushing features of higher complexity to the later cascade stages, where only a few difficult candidate patches remain to be classified. This enables the use of features of vastly different complexities in a single detector. In result, the feature pool can be expanded to features previously impractical for cascade design, such as the responses of a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). This is demonstrated through the design of a pedestrian detector with a pool of features whose complexities span orders of magnitude. The resulting cascade generalizes the combination of a CNN with an object proposal mechanism: rather than a pre-processing stage, CompACT cascades seamlessly integrate CNNs in their stages. This enables state of the art performance on the Caltech and KITTI datasets, at fairly fast speeds.