A 772μJ/frame ImageNet Feature Extractor Accelerator on HD Images at 30FPS

Many applications benefit from AI inference at the edge, in industry, agriculture and transportation domains. The observed trend in image/video analysis is to increase the resolution of sensors, thus increasing the need for powerful, yet ultra-low power and low-latency hardware solutions. In this paper, we explore a novel approach to meet these conflicting requirements and we propose a whole new class of accelerator: the Feature Extractor Accelerator (FEA). This solution enables processing up to HD images ($1280 \times 720$) at 30 frames per second (FPS), using a fraction of the energy of the actual image sensor: it consumes at most 23.2 mW, with a 6.9 ms latency, while reaching 70.42% accuracy on ImageNet. This approach combines two key principles: a feature extraction backbone and transfer learning technique.