A hardware design framework for computer vision models based on reconfigurable devices

Abstract

In computer vision, the joint development of the algorithm and computing dimensions cannot be separated. Models and algorithms are constantly evolving, while hardware designs must adapt to new or updated algorithms. Reconfigurable devices are recognized as important platforms for computer vision applications because of their reconfigurability. There are two typical design approaches: customized and overlay design. However, existing work is unable to achieve both efficient performance and scalability to adapt to a wide range of models. To address both considerations, we propose a design framework based on reconfigurable devices to provide unified support for computer vision models. It provides software-programmable modules while leaving unit design space for problem-specific algorithms. Based on the proposed framework, we design a model mapping method and a hardware architecture with two processor arrays to enable dynamic and static reconfiguration, thereby relieving redesign pressure. In addition, resource consumption and efficiency can be balanced by adjusting the hyperparameter. In experiments on CNN, vision Transformer, and vision MLP models, our work’s throughput is improved by 18.8x–33.6x and 1.4x–2.0x compared to CPU and GPU. Compared to others on the same platform, accelerators based on our framework can better balance resource consumption and efficiency.