Deep embedded lightweight CNN network for indoor objects detection on FPGA

Indoor object detection and recognition present an active research axis in computer vision and artificial intelligence fields. Various deep learning-based techniques can be applied to solve object detection problems. With the appearance of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) a great breakthrough for various applications was achieved. Indoor object detection presents a primary task that can assist Blind and Visually Impaired persons (BVI) during their navigation. However, building a reliable indoor object detection system used for edge device implementations still presents a serious challenge. To address this problem, we propose in this work to build an indoor object detection system based on DCNN network. Cross-stage partial network (CSPNet) was used for the detection process and a lightweight backbone based on EfficientNet v2 was used as a network backbone. To ensure a lightweight implementation of the proposed work on FPGA devices, various optimization techniques have been applied to compress the model size and reduce its computation complexity. The proposed indoor object detection system was implemented on a Xilinx ZCU 102 board. Training and testing experiments have been conducted on the proposed indoor objects dataset that counts 11,000 images containing 25 landmark classes and in indoor objects detection dataset. The proposed work achieved 82.60 mAP and 28 FPS for the original version and 80.04 with 35 FPS as processing speed for the compressed version.