An efficient accelerator unit for sparse convolutional neural network

Abstract

Convolutional neural network is widely used in image recognition. The associated model is computationally demanding. Several solutions are proposed to accelerate its computation. Sparse neural network is an effective way to reduce the computational complexity of neural networks. However, most of the current acceleration programs do not make full use of this feature. In this paper, we design an acceleration unit, using FPGA as the hardware platform. The accelerator unit achieves parallel acceleration through multiple CU models. It eliminates the unnecessary operations by the Match model to improve efficiency. The experimental results show that when the sparsity is ninety percent, the performance can be increased to 3.2 times.