A Digits-Recognition Convolutional Neural Network on FPGA

Sammanfattning: A convolutional neural network (CNN) is a deep learning framework that is widely used in computer vision. A CNN extracts important features of input images by perform- ing convolution and reduces the parameters in the network by applying pooling operation. CNNs are usually implemented with programming languages and run on central process- ing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs). However in recent years, research has been conducted to implement CNNs on field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The objective of this thesis is to implement a CNN on an FPGA with few hardware resources and low power consumption. The CNN we implement is for digits recognition. The input of this CNN is an image of a single digit. The CNN makes inference on what number it is on that image. The performance and power consumption of the FPGA is compared with that of a CPU and a GPU. The results show that our FPGA implementation has better performance than the CPU and the GPU, with respect to runtime, power consumption, and power efficiency.