HgPCN: A Heterogeneous Architecture for E2E Embedded Point Cloud Inference

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gao, Yiming, Jiang, Chao, Piard, Wesley, Chen, Xiangru, Patel, Bhavesh, Lam, Herman
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910782634065920
author Gao, Yiming
Jiang, Chao
Piard, Wesley
Chen, Xiangru
Patel, Bhavesh
Lam, Herman
author_facet Gao, Yiming
Jiang, Chao
Piard, Wesley
Chen, Xiangru
Patel, Bhavesh
Lam, Herman
contents Point cloud is an important type of geometric data structure for many embedded applications such as autonomous driving and augmented reality. Current Point Cloud Networks (PCNs) have proven to achieve great success in using inference to perform point cloud analysis, including object part segmentation, shape classification, and so on. However, point cloud applications on the computing edge require more than just the inference step. They require an end-to-end (E2E) processing of the point cloud workloads: pre-processing of raw data, input preparation, and inference to perform point cloud analysis. Current PCN approaches to support end-to-end processing of point cloud workload cannot meet the real-time latency requirement on the edge, i.e., the ability of the AI service to keep up with the speed of raw data generation by 3D sensors. Latency for end-to-end processing of the point cloud workloads stems from two reasons: memory-intensive down-sampling in the pre-processing phase and the data structuring step for input preparation in the inference phase. In this paper, we present HgPCN, an end-to-end heterogeneous architecture for real-time embedded point cloud applications. In HgPCN, we introduce two novel methodologies based on spatial indexing to address the two identified bottlenecks. In the Pre-processing Engine of HgPCN, an Octree-Indexed-Sampling method is used to optimize the memory-intensive down-sampling bottleneck of the pre-processing phase. In the Inference Engine, HgPCN extends a commercial DLA with a customized Data Structuring Unit which is based on a Voxel-Expanded Gathering method to fundamentally reduce the workload of the data structuring step in the inference phase.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_07767
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HgPCN: A Heterogeneous Architecture for E2E Embedded Point Cloud Inference
Gao, Yiming
Jiang, Chao
Piard, Wesley
Chen, Xiangru
Patel, Bhavesh
Lam, Herman
Hardware Architecture
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Point cloud is an important type of geometric data structure for many embedded applications such as autonomous driving and augmented reality. Current Point Cloud Networks (PCNs) have proven to achieve great success in using inference to perform point cloud analysis, including object part segmentation, shape classification, and so on. However, point cloud applications on the computing edge require more than just the inference step. They require an end-to-end (E2E) processing of the point cloud workloads: pre-processing of raw data, input preparation, and inference to perform point cloud analysis. Current PCN approaches to support end-to-end processing of point cloud workload cannot meet the real-time latency requirement on the edge, i.e., the ability of the AI service to keep up with the speed of raw data generation by 3D sensors. Latency for end-to-end processing of the point cloud workloads stems from two reasons: memory-intensive down-sampling in the pre-processing phase and the data structuring step for input preparation in the inference phase. In this paper, we present HgPCN, an end-to-end heterogeneous architecture for real-time embedded point cloud applications. In HgPCN, we introduce two novel methodologies based on spatial indexing to address the two identified bottlenecks. In the Pre-processing Engine of HgPCN, an Octree-Indexed-Sampling method is used to optimize the memory-intensive down-sampling bottleneck of the pre-processing phase. In the Inference Engine, HgPCN extends a commercial DLA with a customized Data Structuring Unit which is based on a Voxel-Expanded Gathering method to fundamentally reduce the workload of the data structuring step in the inference phase.
title HgPCN: A Heterogeneous Architecture for E2E Embedded Point Cloud Inference
topic Hardware Architecture
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.07767