PixelPrune: Optimizing AIoT Vision Systems via In-Sensor Segmentation and Adaptive Data Transfer

Mohammadreza Mohammadi, Mehrdad Morsali, Sepehr Tabrizchi, Brendan Reidy, Arman Roohi, Shaahin Angizi, Ramtin Zand

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

This paper proposes PixelPrune, an approach to address two primary challenges in artificial intelligence of things (AIoT) vision systems: (1) the energy-intensive analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) required in the sensing unit for converting analog pixel arrays to digital tensors, and (2) the high data transfers between the sensing unit and computing unit. Our proposed solution involves the implementation of an in-sensor binary segmentation model on analog memristive crossbars to identify the important pixels and prune out the background information. Additionally, we propose a data transfer scheme that adaptively selects between dense and sparse data transfer formats based on the sparsity ratio measured from the segmentation mask obtained by the segmentation model. Our results demonstrate that the proposed object detection system achieves significant energy savings along with a considerable up to 95% reduction in data transfer, all while maintaining high accuracy.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationGLSVLSI 2025 - Proceedings of the Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI 2025
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages312-319
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9798400714962
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 29 2025
Event35th Edition of the Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI 2025, GLSVLSI 2025 - New Orleans, United States
Duration: Jun 30 2025Jul 2 2025

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI, GLSVLSI

Conference

Conference35th Edition of the Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI 2025, GLSVLSI 2025
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew Orleans
Period6/30/257/2/25

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Engineering

Keywords

  • and artificial intelligence of things (AIoT)
  • edge computing
  • In-sensor computing
  • machine learning (ML) systems

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