Exploring Hardware Friendly Bottleneck Architecture in CNN for Embedded Computing Systems

In this paper, we explore how to design lightweight CNN architecture for embedded computing systems. We propose L-Mobilenet model for ZYNQ based hardware platform. L-Mobilenet can adapt well to hardware computing and accelerating, and its network structure is inspired by the state-of-the-art work of Inception-Resnet and Mobilenet-V2, which can effectively reduce parameters and delay while maintaining the accuracy of inference. We deploy our L-Mobilenet model to GPU and ZYNQ embedded platform for fully evaluating the performance of our design. By measuring with cifar10 and cifar100 datasets, L-Mobilenet model is able to gain 3× speed up and 3.7× fewer parameters than MobileNet-V2 while maintaining a similar accuracy. It also can obtain 2× speed up and 1.5× fewer parameters than Shufflenet-V2 while maintaining the same accuracy. Experiments show that our network model can obtain better performance because of the special considerations for hardware accelerating and software-hardware co-design strategies in our L-Mobilenet bottleneck architecture.