Low-power ultra-small Edge AI Accelerators for Image Recognition with Convolution Neural Networks: Analysis and Future Directions

Edge AI accelerators have been emerging as a solution for near customers’ applications in areas such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), image recognition sensors, wearable devices, robotics, and remote sensing satellites. These applications not only require meeting performance targets but also meeting strict reliability and resilience constraints due to operations in harsh and hostile environments. Numerous research articles have been proposed, but not all of these include full specifications. Most of these tend to compare their architecture with other existing CPUs, GPUs, or other reference research. This implies that the performance results of the articles are not comprehensive. Thus, this work lists the three key features in the specifications such as computation ability, power consumption, and the area size of prior art edge AI accelerators and the CGRA accelerators during the past few years to define and evaluate the low power ultra-small edge AI accelerators. We introduce the actual evaluation results showing the trend in edge AI accelerator design about key performance metrics to guide designers on the actual performance of existing edge AI accelerators’ capability and provide future design directions and trends for other applications with challenging constraints.