RT-ST-GCN: Enabling Realtime Continual Inference at the Edge

Continual Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (CoST-GCN) is a continual inference optimization of ST-GCN, an established graph-based action classification method. It removes redundant computations in the ST-GCN classifier when applied as a sliding window over a continual stream of data for per-frame predictions. Despite the improvement of CoST-GCN we can only achieve a throughput of 5 fps on a representative edge platform (Raspberry Pi 4). We propose a hardware-driven optimization, termed RT-ST-GCN, which scales down the computational bottleneck of ST-GCN to achieve realtime predictions up to 50 fps. We study and compare the performance of our lightweight model against (Co)ST-GCN on the PKU-MMD continual action dataset. Despite an expected drop in framewise performance metrics, our model shows similar or better performance on key segmental metrics, a constant latency of 20 ms for any temporal kernel size and 3x decrease in memory usage.