EmbML Tool: Supporting the use of Supervised Learning Algorithms in Low-Cost Embedded Systems

Machine Learning (ML) is becoming a ubiquitous technology employed in many real-world applications. In some applications, sensors measure the environment while ML algorithms are responsible for interpreting the data. These systems often face three main restrictions: power consumption, cost, and lack of infrastructure. Therefore, we need highly-efficient classifiers suitable to execute in unresourceful hardware. However, this scenario conflicts to the state-of-practice of ML, in which classifiers are frequently implemented in high-level interpreted languages, make unrestricted use of floating-point operations and assume plenty of resources. In this paper, we present a software tool named EmbML that implements a pipeline to develop classifiers for low-powered embedded systems. It starts with learning a classifier using popular software packages or libraries. Then, EmbML converts the classifier into a carefully crafted C++ code with support for embedded hardware. Our experimental evaluation shows that EmbML classifiers present competitive results in terms of accuracy, time and memory cost.