🏆 1st place winner in the PhD category of the 2023 AMD Open Hardware Competition 🏆

YOLOv5 Object Detection on FPGAs with fpgaConvNet

This repository provides an FPGA-based solution for executing object detection, focusing specifically on the popular YOLOv5 model architecture. By leveraging the power of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and utilising both the fpgaConvNet and the Xilinx PYNQ frameworks, this solution enables high-performance and efficient execution of object detection tasks.

A high-level overview of the proposed solution for YOLOv5 acceleration with fpgaConvNet and PYNQ.

Table of Contents

• Installation
  • FPGA Board Setup with PYNQ
  • Python Environment Setup
• Usage
• Documentation
• License
• Citation

Getting Started

Setup FPGA with PYNQ

1. Download the latest PYNQ image for your FPGA board from here. For this project, we used the ZCU104 board which is officially supported by PYNQ. If you are using a different board, you may need to build the PYNQ image yourself. See here how we built the PYNQ image for the ZCU106 board. Important Notice 1: Make sure to download or build the v3.0.1 version of the PYNQ image which is compatible with the Xilinx Vivado 2022 version which is used to generate the final bistream.
2. Flash the PYNQ image to an SD card.
3. Insert the SD card into the FPGA board and power it on.
4. Follow the instructions here for the initial setup of the ZCU104 board. (similar procedure is also applicable to other boards)
5. Once you have connected the board to your network connect to it via SSH. The default credentials are xilinx for both the username and password.

Python Environment Setup

Once you have connected to the FPGA board via SSH, navigate to the /home/xilinx/jupyter_notebooks folder and clone this repository.

$ cd /home/xilinx/jupyter_notebooks
$ git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/ptoupas/amd-open-hardware-23

Navigate to the cloned repository and run the following commands to install the necessary dependencies:

$ cd amd-open-hardware-23
$ sudo pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

We provide a set of Jupyter notebooks that demonstrate the usage of the FPGA-based object detection solution. The notebooks are located in the root directory of this repository. The following table provides a brief description of each notebook:

Notebook	Description
comparison.ipynb	This notebook provides a comparison between the performance of the FPGA-based solution and the CPU-based solution with ONNX.
predict_yolo.ipynb	This notebook demonstrates how to use the FPGA-based solution to perform object detection through a webcam. It executes the YOLOv5 model on the FPGA and displays the results on the screen in real-time.
validate_yolo.ipynb	This notebook provides a validation of the FPGA-based solution on the coco128 dataset. It executes the YOLOv5 model on the FPGA and displays the validation results on the screen.

Important Notice 3: All of the above notebooks can be configured through various parameters that can be easily modified at the yolov5n.toml file located in the root directory of this repository. For more information about the available parameters, please refer to the documentation section.

Documentation

The following table provides a brief description of the available parameters that can be configured through the yolov5n.toml file:

Parameter	Description
onnx_model_path	The path to the ONNX model file used for the onnxruntime inference (cpu) and for executing the head of the YOLOv5 model on the FPGA scenario.
visualize	Whether to visualize the results of the inference or not.
val_data_path	The path to the coco128 dataset used for the validation scenario.
inf_exec	The target device for the inference execution. Can be either cpu or fpga.
source	The source of the input data. Can be either webcam or a path to a video file (an example video file is provided in the input_video directory).
input_data.imgsz	The size of the input image.
predictor.conf_thres	The confidence threshold to be used during the detection.
predictor.iou_thres	The IoU threshold to be used during the detection.
predictor.classes	The classes to be identified during the detection. Leave empty to identify all classes.
hardware.bitstream_path	The path to the bitstream file generated by Vivado.
hardware.weights_path	The path to the weights directory containing the weights of the YOLOv5 model that will be loaded to the FPGA.

License

This project is licensed under the GNU GPLv3 License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Citation

If you find this project useful in your research, please consider citing our work:

@article{toupas2023harflow3d,
        author={Toupas, Petros and Montgomerie-Corcoran, Alexander and Bouganis, Christos-Savvas and Tzovaras, Dimitrios},
        booktitle = {2023 31st International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM)},
        title={HARFLOW3D: A Latency-Oriented 3D-CNN Accelerator Toolflow for HAR on FPGA Devices},
        year={2023}
}

@inproceedings{montgomerie2022samo,
        author={Montgomerie-Corcoran, Alexander and Yu, Zhewen and Bouganis, Christos-Savvas},
        booktitle={2022 32nd International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL)},
        title={SAMO: Optimised Mapping of Convolutional Neural Networks to Streaming Architectures},
        year={2022}
}

@article{venieris2019fpgaconvnet,
        author={Venieris, Stylianos I. and Bouganis, Christos-Savvas},
        journal={IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems},
        title={fpgaConvNet: Mapping Regular and Irregular Convolutional Neural Networks on FPGAs},
        year={2019}
}