1. LOCATOR: Low-power ORB accelerator for autonomous cars.
- Author
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Taranco, Raúl, Arnau, José-Maria, and González, Antonio
- Subjects
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GENETIC algorithms , *DRIVERLESS cars , *FEATURE extraction , *ENERGY consumption - Abstract
Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) is crucial for autonomous navigation. ORB-SLAM is a state-of-the-art Visual SLAM system based on cameras used for self-driving cars. In this paper, we propose a high-performance, energy-efficient, and functionally accurate hardware accelerator for ORB-SLAM, focusing on its most time-consuming stage: Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF (ORB) feature extraction. The Rotated BRIEF (rBRIEF) descriptor generation is the main bottleneck in ORB computation, as it exhibits highly irregular access patterns to local on-chip memories causing a high-performance penalty due to bank conflicts. We introduce a technique to find an optimal static pattern to perform parallel accesses to banks based on a genetic algorithm. Furthermore, we propose the combination of an rBRIEF pixel duplication cache, selective ports replication, and pipelining to reduce latency without compromising cost. The accelerator achieves a reduction in energy consumption of 14597× and 9609×, with respect to high-end CPU and GPU platforms, respectively. • Feature extraction takes 60% of the localization execution time in current solutions. • Streaming architecture in which the bottleneck is the computation of rBRIEF. • A genetic algorithm can statically reorder the rBRIEF pattern to reduce the latency. • Optimizations include: pixel cache, selective replication of ports and pipelining. • Search of the most energy efficient factors that fulfill the self-drivings requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2023
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