{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/190909709","title":"SkyNet: a Hardware-Efficient Method for Object Detection and Tracking on Embedded Systems","arxiv_id":"1909.09709","date":"2019-09-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["Xiaofan Zhang","Haoming Lu","Cong Hao","Jiachen Li","Bowen Cheng","Yuhong Li","Kyle Rupnow","JinJun Xiong","Thomas Huang","Honghui Shi","Wen-mei Hwu","Deming Chen"],"abstract":"Object detection and tracking are challenging tasks for resource-constrained embedded systems. While these tasks are among the most compute-intensive tasks from the artificial intelligence domain, they are only allowed to use limited computation and memory resources on embedded devices. In the meanwhile, such resource-constrained implementations are often required to satisfy additional demanding requirements such as real-time response, high-throughput performance, and reliable inference accuracy. To overcome these challenges, we propose SkyNet, a hardware-efficient neural network to deliver the state-of-the-art detection accuracy and speed for embedded systems. Instead of following the common top-down flow for compact DNN (Deep Neural Network) design, SkyNet provides a bottom-up DNN design approach with comprehensive understanding of the hardware constraints at the very beginning to deliver hardware-efficient DNNs. The effectiveness of SkyNet is demonstrated by winning the competitive System Design Contest for low power object detection in the 56th IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference (DAC-SDC), where our SkyNet significantly outperforms all other 100+ competitors: it delivers 0.731 Intersection over Union (IoU) and 67.33 frames per second (FPS) on a TX2 embedded GPU; and 0.716 IoU and 25.05 FPS on an Ultra96 embedded FPGA. The evaluation of SkyNet is also extended to GOT-10K, a recent large-scale high-diversity benchmark for generic object tracking in the wild. For state-of-the-art object trackers SiamRPN++ and SiamMask, where ResNet-50 is employed as the backbone, implementations using our SkyNet as the backbone DNN are 1.60X and 1.73X faster with better or similar accuracy when running on a 1080Ti GPU, and 37.20X smaller in terms of parameter size for significantly better memory and storage footprint.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.09709v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.09709v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"190909709","repo_url":"https://github.com/TomG008/SkyNet","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"NOASSERTION"}},{"paper_slug":"190909709","repo_url":"https://github.com/maxpark/SkyNet-1","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"NOASSERTION"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"efficient-neural-network","task_name":"Efficient Neural Network"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"GPU"},{"task_slug":"object","task_name":"Object"},{"task_slug":"object-detection","task_name":"Object Detection"},{"task_slug":"object-tracking","task_name":"Object Tracking"},{"task_slug":"object-detection-1","task_name":"object-detection"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"speed","method_name":"SPEED"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1909.09709","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}