Deep learning-based target detectors are in demand for a wide range of applications, often in areas such as robotics and the automotive industry. The high computational requirements of deep learning severely limit its ability to be deployed on resource-constrained and energy-first devices. To address this problem, we propose a class YOLO target detection algorithm and deploy it to an FPGA platform. Based on the FPGA platform, we can make full use of its computational features of parallel computing, and the computational units such as convolution, pooling and Concat layers in the model can be accelerated for inference.To enable our algorithm to run efficiently on FPGAs, we quantized the model and wrote the corresponding hardware operators based on the model units. The proposed object detection accelerator has been implemented and verified on the Xilinx ZYNQ platform. Experimental results show that the detection accuracy of the algorithm model is comparable to that of common algorithms, and the power consumption is much lower than that of the CPU and GPU. After deployment, the accelerator has a fast inference speed and is suitable for deployment on mobile devices to detect the surrounding environment.
Keywords: FPGA; QNN; neural network accelerator; object detection.