FPGA-Accelerated for Constrained High Dispersal Network

In recent years, the Deep Neural Network (DNN) has been successfully used in image classification. Most of existing DNN often need to learn a very large set of parameters, which require a huge amount of computational resources and time to train these model parameters using the gradient descent and back-propagation procedure. To solve this issue, the PCANet has been developed for high efficient design and training of the DNN. Compared with traditional DNN, PCANet has simpler structure and better performance, which makes it attractive for hardware design. To overcome the limitations of PCANet and significantly improve its performance, we have proposed a novel model named Constrained High Dispersal Network (CHDNet) which is a variant of PCANet. In this paper, we implement the CHDNet on the Xilinx ZYNQ FPGA to ensure the instantaneity of the system with lower power than personal computer needed by taking advantage of the algorithmic parallelism and ZYNQ architecture. Our experimental results over two major datasets, the MNIST dataset for handwritten digits recognition, and the Extended Yale B dataset for face recognition, demonstrate that our model of implementation on FPGA is more than 15x faster than software implementation on PC (Intel i7-4720HQ, 2.6GHz).