EffCNet: An Efficient CondenseNet for Image Classification on NXP BlueBox

Abstract: Intelligent edge devices with built-in processors vary widely in terms of capability and physical form to perform advanced Computer Vision (CV) tasks such as image classification and object detection, for example. With constant advances in the field of autonomous cars and UAVs, embedded systems and mobile devices, there has been an ever-growing demand for extremely efficient Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) for real-time inference on these smart edge devices with constrained computational resources. With unreliable network connections in remote regions and an added complexity of data transmission, it is of an utmost importance to capture and process data locally instead of sending the data to cloud servers for remote processing. Edge devices on the other hand, offer limited processing power due to their inexpensive hardware, and limited cooling and computational resources. In this paper, we propose a novel deep convolutional neural network architecture called EffCNet which is an improved and an efficient version of CondenseNet Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for edge devices utilizing self-querying data augmentation and depthwise separable convolutional strategies to improve real-time inference performance as well as reduce the final trained model size, trainable parameters, and Floating-Point Operations (FLOPs) of EffCNet CNN. Furthermore, extensive supervised image classification analyses are conducted on two benchmarking datasets: CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, to verify real-time inference performance of our proposed CNN. Finally, we deploy these trained weights on NXP BlueBox which is an intelligent edge development platform designed for self-driving vehicles and UAVs, and conclusions will be extrapolated accordingly.