A 1Mb mixed-precision quantized encoder for image classification and patch-based compression

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nguyen, Van Thien, Guicquero, William, Sicard, Gilles
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Nguyen, Van Thien
Guicquero, William
Sicard, Gilles
author_facet Nguyen, Van Thien
Guicquero, William
Sicard, Gilles
contents Even if Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) have proven to be a relevant choice for integrating inference at the edge, they are often limited in terms of applicability. In this paper, we demonstrate that an ASIC neural network accelerator dedicated to image processing can be applied to multiple tasks of different levels: image classification and compression, while requiring a very limited hardware. The key component is a reconfigurable, mixed-precision (3b/2b/1b) encoder that takes advantage of proper weight and activation quantizations combined with convolutional layer structural pruning to lower hardware-related constraints (memory and computing). We introduce an automatic adaptation of linear symmetric quantizer scaling factors to perform quantized levels equalization, aiming at stabilizing quinary and ternary weights training. In addition, a proposed layer-shared Bit-Shift Normalization significantly simplifies the implementation of the hardware-expensive Batch Normalization. For a specific configuration in which the encoder design only requires 1Mb, the classification accuracy reaches 87.5% on CIFAR-10. Besides, we also show that this quantized encoder can be used to compress image patch-by-patch while the reconstruction can performed remotely, by a dedicated full-frame decoder. This solution typically enables an end-to-end compression almost without any block artifacts, outperforming patch-based state-of-the-art techniques employing a patch-constant bitrate.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_05097
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A 1Mb mixed-precision quantized encoder for image classification and patch-based compression
Nguyen, Van Thien
Guicquero, William
Sicard, Gilles
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Image and Video Processing
Even if Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) have proven to be a relevant choice for integrating inference at the edge, they are often limited in terms of applicability. In this paper, we demonstrate that an ASIC neural network accelerator dedicated to image processing can be applied to multiple tasks of different levels: image classification and compression, while requiring a very limited hardware. The key component is a reconfigurable, mixed-precision (3b/2b/1b) encoder that takes advantage of proper weight and activation quantizations combined with convolutional layer structural pruning to lower hardware-related constraints (memory and computing). We introduce an automatic adaptation of linear symmetric quantizer scaling factors to perform quantized levels equalization, aiming at stabilizing quinary and ternary weights training. In addition, a proposed layer-shared Bit-Shift Normalization significantly simplifies the implementation of the hardware-expensive Batch Normalization. For a specific configuration in which the encoder design only requires 1Mb, the classification accuracy reaches 87.5% on CIFAR-10. Besides, we also show that this quantized encoder can be used to compress image patch-by-patch while the reconstruction can performed remotely, by a dedicated full-frame decoder. This solution typically enables an end-to-end compression almost without any block artifacts, outperforming patch-based state-of-the-art techniques employing a patch-constant bitrate.
title A 1Mb mixed-precision quantized encoder for image classification and patch-based compression
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.05097