Embedded Face Recognition for Personalized Services in the Assistive Robotics

Recently, the field of assistive robotics has drawn much attention in the health care sector. In combination with modern machine learning-supported person recognition systems, they can deliver highly personalized services. However, common algorithms for person recognition such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) consume high amounts of power and show low energy efficiency when executed on general-purpose computing platforms.
In this paper, we present our hardware architecture and field programmable gate array (FPGA) accelerator to enable on-device person recognition in the context of assistive robotics. Therefore, we optimize a neural network based on the SqueezeNet topology and implement it on an FPGA for a high degree of flexibility and reconfigurability. By pruning redundant filters and quantization of weights and activations, we are able to find a well-fitting neural network that achieves a high identification accuracy of 84%. On a Xilinx Zynq Ultra96v2, we achieve a power consumption of 4.8 W, a latency of 31 ms and an efficiency of 6.738 FPS/W. Our results outperform the latency by 1.6x compared to recent person recognition systems in assistive robots and energy efficiency by 1.7x for embedded face recognition, respectively.