Brain-inspired Classroom Occupancy Monitoring on a Low-Power Mobile Platform

Francesco Conti, Antonio Pullini, Luca Benini; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2014, pp. 610-615

Brain-inspired computer vision (BICV) has evolved rapidly in recent years and it is now competitive with traditional CV approaches. However, most of BICV algorithms have been developed on high power-and-performance platforms (e.g. workstations) or special purpose hardware. We propose two different algorithms for counting people in a classroom, both based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), a state-of-art deep learning model that is inspired on the structure of the human visual cortex. Furthermore, we provide a standalone parallel C library that implements CNNs and use it to deploy our algorithms on the embedded mobile ARM big.LITTLE-based Odroid-XU platform. Our performance and power measurements show that neuromorphic vision is feasible on off-the-shelf embedded mobile platforms, and we show that it can reach very good energy efficiency for non-time-critical tasks such as people counting.