Papers › TakuNet: an Energy-Efficient CNN for Real-Time Inference on Embedded UAV systems in...

TakuNet: an Energy-Efficient CNN for Real-Time Inference on Embedded UAV systems in Emergency Response Scenarios

10 Jan 2025arXiv:2501.05880archive 2025-07-28

Daniel Rossi, Guido Borghi, Roberto Vezzani

Designing efficient neural networks for embedded devices is a critical challenge, particularly in applications requiring real-time performance, such as aerial imaging with drones and UAVs for emergency responses. In this work, we introduce TakuNet, a novel light-weight architecture which employs techniques such as depth-wise convolutions and an early downsampling stem to reduce computational complexity while maintaining high accuracy. It leverages dense connections for fast convergence during training and uses 16-bit floating-point precision for optimization on embedded hardware accelerators. Experimental evaluation on two public datasets shows that TakuNet achieves near-state-of-the-art accuracy in classifying aerial images of emergency situations, despite its minimal parameter count. Real-world tests on embedded devices, namely Jetson Orin Nano and Raspberry Pi, confirm TakuNet's efficiency, achieving more than 650 fps on the 15W Jetson board, making it suitable for real-time AI processing on resource-constrained platforms and advancing the applicability of drones in emergency scenarios. The code and implementation details are publicly released.

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Code

danielrossi1/takunet officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Aerial Scene ClassificationImage ClassificationRaspberry Pi 3Raspberry Pi 4Raspberry Pi 5

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Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Classification AIDER TakuNet FP=16 Test F1 score 0.943 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification AIDERV2 TakuNet FP=16 Test F1 score 0.958 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

1x1 ConvolutionBatch NormalizationConvolutionDense ConnectionsDepthwise ConvolutionGrouped ConvolutionPointwise ConvolutionReLUResidual BlockResidual Connection

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