A Lightweight Collaborative Recognition System with Binary Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Web Augmented Reality
Yakun Huang, Xiuquan Qiao, Pei Ren, Ling Liu, Calton Pu, Junliang Chen · 2019
Lightweight and precise recognition is a key component of web-based augmented reality (Web AR) applications. Although edge-based distributed deep learning approach is now possible to achieve satisfactory recognition for Web AR applications, it puts significant pressure on the computation and energy consumption of the mobile web browser, especially the app-based embedded browser. Thus, reducing the model size and accelerating the inference are regarded as the two fundamental challenges to enable this edge-based collaborative recognition system efficiently. In this paper, we propose a lightweight collaborative recognition system (LCRS) for Web AR applications. LCRS contributes to three aspects: (1) we design a composite deep neural network for reducing the model size and inference latency by introducing binary convolutional neural network; (2) we provide a joint training method to co-train the general branch and the binary branch; (3) we develop a JavaScript library for the mobile web browser to execute and accelerate inference of the binary branch, which also provides a collaborative mechanism between the mobile web browser and the edge server. We have conducted extensive experiments using several well-known networks and datasets. The experimental results have shown that the proposed system outperforms the existing approaches in terms of reducing the model size by about 16x to 29x, and it also reduces end-to-end latency and outpaces the existing state-of-the-art approaches by over 3x to 60x when applying it in practical Web AR cases.