SPEED: Open-source framework to accelerate speech recognition on embedded GPUs

Due to high accuracy, inherent redundancy, and embarrassingly parallel nature, the neural networks are fast becoming mainstream machine learning algorithms. However, these advantages come at the cost of high memory and processing requirements (that can be met by either GPUs, FPGAs or ASICs). For embedded systems, the requirements are particularly challenging because of stiff power and timing budgets. Due to the availability of efficient mapping tools, GPUs are an appealing platforms to implement the neural networks. While, there is significant work that implements the image recognition (in particular Convolutional Neural Networks) on GPUs, only a few works deal with efficiently implement of speech recognition on GPUs. The work that does focus on implementing speech recognition does not address embedded systems. To tackle this issue, this paper presents SPEED (Open-source framework to accelerate speech recognition on embedded GPUs). We have used Eesen speech recognition framework because it is considered as the most accurate speech recognition technique. Experimental results reveal that the proposed techniques offer 2.6X speedup compared to state of the art.