ApproxEye: Enabling approximate computation reuse for microrobotic computer vision
Xin James He, Guihai Yan, F.G. Sun, Yinhe Han, Xiaowei Li · 2017
Aiming at real-life problems, microrobotic systems have gained more and more attention. However, limited achievable performance of microrobotic system prevents it from carrying out complex tasks. Current research work propose customize designs for different applications and incorporate dedicated accelerator for high energy efficiency. However, not only such techniques require significant manual effort and expertise for specified applications, but also the accelerator itself dictates unnegligible amount of chip resources. So in this paper we propose ApproxEye, a partial approximate computation reuse framework to accelerate microrobotic computer vision. Leveraging computation locality, ApproxEye reuses previous “similar” computations to reduce redundant computations. To squeeze every piece of computation reuse opportunity, ApproxEye proposes to 1) heuristically define optimal reuse granularity and 2) apply adaptive reuse requirements for different computations. Moreover, to reduce latency of computation reuse, ApproxEye tailors a parallel implemented search scheme for approximate computation reuse. Experimental results show ApproxEye could effectively exploit the potential of computation reuse and achieve 57.05% speedup on average.