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Bringing Real-Time Object Detection
to MCUs with Edge Impulse FOMO By Jan Jongboom, Edge Impulse
We humans rely heavily on sight to perform many daily tasks, from some of the most basic to the most complex. With one look, we know if there are people in the room with us, if there’s an elephant nearby, or how many free parking spaces are available. Despite the importance of vision, though, many embedded devices still can’t perceive things visually. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could teach all our devices to see the world the way we do? In recent years, there have been some amazing developments in computer vision, fueling progress in things like self-driving cars and biometric immigration gates (very useful if, like me, you travel a lot!). But these use cases are incredibly computationally expensive, requiring costly GPUs or special accelerators to run. The awesome thing is that not all computer-vision tasks require such intensive compute. Any yes/no question (“Do I see an elephant?,” “Is this label properly attached to the bottle?”) can add tremendous value to constrained embedded devices. What’s more, these problems of image classification can even be solved by today’s microcontrollers.
Imagine if we could add even more advanced vision capabilities to every embedded device!
Say Hello to FOMO
We’re making it a reality. We developed a novel neural network architecture for object detection called Faster Objects, More Objects, or FOMO (Figure 1). It’s designed from the ground up to run in real-time on microcontrollers, so embedded engineers can (ahem) avoid the fear of missing out when it comes to computer vision.
Fast, Lean & Flexible
FOMO is capable of running on a 32-bit MCU, like an Arm Cortex-M7, with a frame rate of 30 frames per second. And the next time you choose a Raspberry Pi 4 type device, you’ll be able to do object detection at a rate of about 60 frames a second. That’s roughly 30 times faster than MobileNet SSD or YOLOv5.
Figure 1: FOMO classification within Edge Impulse Studio.
82 embedded world Special 2022 www.elektormagazine.com
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