High-level design of a Depthwise Convolution accelerator and SoC integration using ESP

Riccardo Capodicasa

High-level design of a Depthwise Convolution accelerator and SoC integration using ESP.

Rel. Mario Roberto Casu. Politecnico di Torino, Master of science program in Electronic Engineering, 2022

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Abstract

One of the hardest challenge that industry had to front in the last few years was finding a solution to understand the content of an image in a fully automatic way, this branch of study is called "Computer Vision". According to LDV Capital, the number of cameras around the world will proliferate to at least 220% or 45 billion by 2022. This impressive forecast gives one of the reasons why we need techniques to process and classify images in an effective way. From this, one of the most challenging problem in computer vision is "Object Detection", that is the capability to locate object instances inside an image.

In order to solve effectively not only the object detection problem, but also an entire set of very complex problems like speech recognition, in 1950s the computer scientist John McCarthy, coined a totally new paradigm called Artificial Intelligence (AI) or "the science and engineering of creating intelligent machines that have the ability to achieve goals like humans do"