Designing efficient neural networks for embedded devices is a critical challenge, particularly in applications requiring real-time performance, such as aerial imaging with drones and UAVs for emergency responses. In this work, we introduce TakuNet, a novel light-weight architecture which employs techniques such as depth-wise convolutions and an early downsampling stem to reduce computational complexity while maintaining high accuracy. It leverages dense connections for fast convergence during training and uses 16-bit floating-point precision for optimization on embedded hardware accelerators. Experimental evaluation on two public datasets shows that TakuNet achieves near-state-of-the-art accuracy in classifying aerial images of emergency situations, despite its minimal parameter count. Real-world tests on embedded devices, namely Jetson Orin Nano and Raspberry Pi, confirm TakuNet's efficiency, achieving more than 650 fps on the 15W Jetson board, making it suitable for real-time AI processing on resource-constrained platforms and advancing the applicability of drones in emergency scenarios. The code and implementation details are publicly released.
Sound event localization and detection (SELD) is critical for various real-world applications, including smart monitoring and Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Although deep neural networks (DNNs) represent the state-of-the-art approach for SELD, their significant computational complexity and model sizes present challenges for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices, especially under real-time conditions. Despite the growing need for real-time SELD, research in this area remains limited. In this paper, we investigate the unique challenges of deploying SELD systems for real-world, real-time applications by performing extensive experiments on a commercially available Raspberry Pi 3 edge device. Our findings reveal two critical, often overlooked considerations: the high computational cost of feature extraction and the performance degradation associated with low-latency, real-time inference. This paper provides valuable insights and considerations for future work toward developing more efficient and robust real-time SELD systems
Face detection, as a fundamental technology for various applications, is always deployed on edge devices which have limited memory storage and low computing power. This paper introduces a Light and Fast Face Detector (LFFD) for edge devices. The proposed method is anchor-free and belongs to the one-stage category. Specifically, we rethink the importance of receptive field (RF) and effective receptive field (ERF) in the background of face detection. Essentially, the RFs of neurons in a certain layer are distributed regularly in the input image and theses RFs are natural "anchors". Combining RF "anchors" and appropriate RF strides, the proposed method can detect a large range of continuous face scales with 100% coverage in theory. The insightful understanding of relations between ERF and face scales motivates an efficient backbone for one-stage detection. The backbone is characterized by eight detection branches and common layers, resulting in efficient computation. Comprehensive and extensive experiments on popular benchmarks: WIDER FACE and FDDB are conducted. A new evaluation schema is proposed for application-oriented scenarios. Under the new schema, the proposed method can achieve superior accuracy (WIDER FACE Val/Test -- Easy: 0.910/0.896, Medium: 0.881/0.865, Hard: 0.780/0.770; FDDB -- discontinuous: 0.973, continuous: 0.724). Multiple hardware platforms are introduced to evaluate the running efficiency. The proposed method can obtain fast inference speed (NVIDIA TITAN Xp: 131.45 FPS at 640x480; NVIDIA TX2: 136.99 PFS at 160x120; Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+: 8.44 FPS at 160x120) with model size of 9 MB.
Unsupervised depth estimation from a single image is a very attractive technique with several implications in robotic, autonomous navigation, augmented reality and so on. This topic represents a very challenging task and the advent of deep learning enabled to tackle this problem with excellent results. However, these architectures are extremely deep and complex. Thus, real-time performance can be achieved only by leveraging power-hungry GPUs that do not allow to infer depth maps in application fields characterized by low-power constraints. To tackle this issue, in this paper we propose a novel architecture capable to quickly infer an accurate depth map on a CPU, even of an embedded system, using a pyramid of features extracted from a single input image. Similarly to state-of-the-art, we train our network in an unsupervised manner casting depth estimation as an image reconstruction problem. Extensive experimental results on the KITTI dataset show that compared to the top performing approach our network has similar accuracy but a much lower complexity (about 6% of parameters) enabling to infer a depth map for a KITTI image in about 1.7 s on the Raspberry Pi 3 and at more than 8 Hz on a standard CPU. Moreover, by trading accuracy for efficiency, our network allows to infer maps at about 2 Hz and 40 Hz respectively, still being more accurate than most state-of-the-art slower methods. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first method enabling such performance on CPUs paving the way for effective deployment of unsupervised monocular depth estimation even on embedded systems.