ABM-SpConv-SIMD: Accelerating Convolutional Neural Network Inference for Industrial IoT Applications on Edge Devices

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been widely deployed, while traditional cloud data-centers based applications suffer from the bandwidth and latency network demand when applying to Industrial-Internet-of-Things (IIoT) fields. It is critical to migrate the CNNs inference to edge devices for efficiency and security concerns. However, it is challenging to deploy complex CNNs on resource-constraint IIoT edge devices due to a large number of parameters and intensive floating-point computations. In this paper, we propose ABM-SpConv-SIMD, an on-device inference optimization framework, aiming at accelerating the network inference by fully utilizing the low-cost and common CPU resource. ABM-SpConv-SIMD first adopts a model optimizer with pruning and quantization, which produces
Sp
arse
Conv
olutional models. And then, the
A
ccumulation-
B
efore-
M
ultiplication mechanism is proposed to reduce multiplication operations. Additionally, the
SIMD
instructions, which are commonly available on cost-effective edge devices, are employed to improve the performance of convolutions. We have implemented
ABM-SpConv-SIMD
base on the ARM Compute Library software framework and evaluated on Hikey970 and Raspberry Pi devices with two representative models AlexNet and ResNet50. The results show that the ABM-SpConv-SIMD can significantly improve the performance, and achieve on average of 1.96x and 1.73x speedup respectively over the baseline implementation with negligible loss of accuracy.