Re-thinking CNN Frameworks for Time-Sensitive Autonomous-Driving Applications: Addressing an Industrial Challenge

Vision-based perception systems are crucial for profitable autonomous-driving vehicle products. High accuracy in such perception systems is being enabled by rapidly evolving convolution neural networks (CNNs). To achieve a better understanding of its surrounding environment, a vehicle must be provided with full coverage via multiple cameras. However, when processing multiple video streams, existing CNN frameworks often fail to provide enough inference performance, particularly on embedded hardware constrained by size, weight, and power limits. This paper presents the results of an industrial case study that was conducted to re-think the design of CNN software to better utilize available hardware resources. In this study, techniques such as parallelism, pipelining, and the merging of per-camera images into a single composite image were considered in the context of a Drive PX2 embedded hardware platform. The study identifies a combination of techniques that can be applied to increase throughput (number of simultaneous camera streams) without significantly increasing per-frame latency (camera to CNN output) or reducing per-stream accuracy.