A Kernel Decomposition Architecture for Binary-weight Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

The binary-weight CNN is one of the most efficient solutions for mobile CNNs. However, a large number of operations are required to process each image. To reduce such a huge operation count, we propose an energy-efficient kernel decomposition architecture, based on the observation that a large number of operations are redundant. In this scheme, all kernels are decomposed into sub-kernels to expose the common parts. By skipping the redundant computations, the operation count for each image was consequently reduced by 47.7%. Furthermore, a low cost bit-width quantization technique was implemented by exploiting the relative scales of the feature data. Experimental results showed that the proposed architecture achieves a 22% energy reduction.