B-Face: 0.2 MW CNN-Based Face Recognition Processor with Face Alignment for Mobile User Identification

An ultra-low-power face recognition processor with binary weight convolutional neural network core and face alignment accelerator is proposed for high accuracy even with head pose variations. Binary convolution core with exhaustive input reuse and interleaved output memory access is proposed to minimize power consumption, resulting in 13.3 TOPS/W power efficiency. In addition, face alignment core with zero-aware pipelining is proposed to minimize external memory access. As a result, the face recognition system with maximum 48 frames-per-second throughput and 0.2 mW minimum power consumption is realized.