Scalable Hardware Acceleration of Non-Maximum Suppression

Non-maximum Suppression (NMS) in one- and two-stage object detection deep neural networks (e.g., SSD and Faster-RCNN) is becoming the computation bottleneck. In this paper, we introduce a hardware acceleration for the scalable PSRR-MaxpoolNMS algorithm. Our architecture shows 75.0× and 305× speedups compared to the software implementation of the PSRR-MaxpoolNMS as well as the hardware implementations of GreedyNMS, respectively, while simultaneously achieving comparable Mean Average Precision (mAP) to software-based floating-point implementations. Our architecture is 13.4× faster than the state-of-the-art NMS one. Our accelerator supports both one- and two-stage detectors, while supporting very high input resolutions (i.e., FHD)—essential input size for better detection accuracy.