An FPGA Realization of OpenPose based on a Sparse Weight Convolutional Neural Network

The OpenPose is a kind of a deep learning based pose estimator which achieved a top accuracy for multiple person pose estimations. Even if using the OpenPose, it is necessary to used high-performance GPU since it requires massive parameters access with high-bandwidth off-chip GDDR5 memories and a higher operation clock frequency. Thus, the power consumption becomes a critical issue to realization. Also, its computation time is slower than the current video standard frame speed (29.97 FPS). In the paper, we introduce a sparse weight CNN to reduce the amount of memory size for weights, which is Then, we offer the indirect memory access architecture to realize the sparse CNN convolutional operation efficiently. Also, to increase throughput further, we applied the six stages of pipeline architecture with a pipeline buffer memory realization. Our implementation satisfied the timing constraint for real-time applications. Since our architecture computed an image with 42.6 msec, the number of frames per second (FPS) was 23.43. We measured the total board power consumption: It was 55 Watt. Thus, the performance per power efficiency was 0.444 (FPS/W). Compared with the NVidia Titan X Pascal architecture GPU, it was 3.49 times faster, it dissipated 3.54 times lower power, and its performance per power efficiency was 13.05 times better. As far as we know, this work is the first FPGA implementation of the OpenPose.