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Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) suffer from energy-hungry implementation due to their computation and memory intensive processing patterns. This problem is even more significant by the proliferation of CNNs on embedded platforms. To overcome this problem, we offer NeuroPower as an automatic framework that designs a highly optimized and energy efficient set of CNN architectures for embedded systems. NeuroPower explores and prunes the design space to find improved set of neural architectures. Toward this aim, a multi-objective optimization strategy is integrated to solve Neural Architecture Search (NAS) problem by near-optimal tuning network hyperparameters. The main objectives of the optimization algorithm are network accuracy and number of parameters in the network. The evaluation results show the effectiveness of NeuroPower on energy consumption, compacting rate and inference time compared to other cutting-edge approaches. In comparison with the best results on CIFAR-10/CIFAR-100 datasets, a generated network by NeuroPower presents up to 2.1x/1.56x compression rate, 1.59x/3.46x speedup and 1.52x/1.82x power saving while loses 2.4%/-0.6% accuracy, respectively.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are compute-intensive learning models with growing applicability in a wide range of domains. Due to their computational complexity, DNNs benefit from implementations that utilize custom hardware accelerators to meet performance and response time as well as classification accuracy constraints. In this paper, we propose DeepMaker framework that aims to automatically design a set of highly robust DNN architectures for embedded devices as the closest processing unit to the sensors. DeepMaker explores and prunes the design space to find improved neural architectures. Our proposed framework takes advantage of a multi-objective evolutionary approach that exploits a pruned design space inspired by a dense architecture. DeepMaker considers the accuracy along with the network size factor as two objectives to build a highly optimized network fitting with limited computational resource budgets while delivers an acceptable accuracy level. In comparison with the best result on the CIFAR-10 dataset, a generated network by DeepMaker presents up to a 26.4x compression rate while loses only 4% accuracy. Besides, DeepMaker maps the generated CNN on the programmable commodity devices, including ARM Processor, High-Performance CPU, GPU, and FPGA. 

High computation demands and big memory resources are the major implementation challenges of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) especially for low-power and resource-limited embedded devices. Many binarized neural networks are recently proposed to address these issues. Although they have significantly decreased computation and memory footprint, they have suffered from accuracy loss especially for large datasets. In this paper, we propose TOT-Net, a ternarized neural network with [-1, 0, 1] values for both weights and activation functions that has simultaneously achieved a higher level of accuracy and less computational load. In fact, first, TOT-Net introduces a simple bitwise logic for convolution computations to reduce the cost of multiply operations. To improve the accuracy, selecting proper activation function and learning rate are influential, but also difficult. As the second contribution, we propose a novel piece-wise activation function, and optimized learning rate for different datasets. Our findings first reveal that 0.01 is a preferable learning rate for the studied datasets. Third, by using an evolutionary optimization approach, we found novel piece-wise activation functions customized for TOT-Net. According to the experimental results, TOT-Net achieves 2.15%, 8.77%, and 5.7/5.52% better accuracy compared to XNOR-Net on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet top-5/top-1 datasets, respectively.

Stereo vision cameras are flexible sensors due to providing heterogeneous information such as color, luminance, disparity map (depth), and shape of the objects. Today, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) present the highest accuracy for the disparity map estimation [1]. However, CNNs require considerable computing capacity to process billions of floating-point operations in a real-time fashion. Besides, commercial stereo cameras produce huge size images (e.g., 10 Megapixels [2]), which impose a new computational cost to the system. The problem will be pronounced if we target resource-limited hardware for the implementation. In this paper, we propose DenseDisp, an automatic framework that designs a Siamese neural architecture for disparity map estimation in a reasonable time. DenseDisp leverages a meta-heuristic multi-objective exploration to discover hardware-friendly architectures by considering accuracy and network FLOPS as the optimization objectives. We explore the design space with four different fitness functions to improve the accuracy-FLOPS trade-off and convergency time of the DenseDisp. According to the experimental results, DenseDisp provides up to 39.1x compression rate while losing around 5% accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art results.