Deshanand Singh, Director of Software Engineering at Altera, presents the "Efficient Implementation of Convolutional Neural Networks using OpenCL on FPGAs" tutorial at the May 2015 Embedded Vision Summit.
Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are becoming increasingly popular in embedded applications such as vision processing and automotive driver assistance systems. The structure of CNN systems is characterized by cascades of FIR filters and transcendental functions. FPGA technology offers a very efficient way of implementing these structures by allowing designers to build custom hardware datapaths that implement the CNN structure. One challenge of using FPGAs revolves around the design flow that has been traditionally centered around tedious hardware description languages.
In this talk, Deshanand gives a detailed explanation of how CNN algorithms can be expressed in OpenCL and compiled directly to FPGA hardware. He gives detail on code optimizations and provides comparisons with the efficiency of hand-coded implementations.
