CNN Inference: Dynamic and Predictive Quantization

Deep Learning techniques like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are the de-facto method for image classification with broad usage spanning across automotive, industrial, medicine, robotics etc. Efficient implementation of CNN inference on embedded device requires a quantization method, which minimizes the accuracy loss, ability to generalize across deployment scenarios as well as real-time processing. Existing literature doesn't address all these three requirements simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel quantization algorithm to overcome above mentioned challenges. The proposed solution dynamically selects the scale for quantizing activations and uses Kalman filter to predict quantization scale to reduce accuracy loss. The proposed solution exploits the range statistics from previous inference processes to estimate quantization scale, enabling real-time solution. The proposed solution is implemented on TI's TDA family of embedded automotive processors. The proposed solution is running real time semantic segmentation on TDA2x processor within 0.1% accuracy loss compared floating point algorithm. The solution performs well across multiple deployment scenarios (e.g. rain, snow, night etc) demonstrating generalization capability of the solution.