Vision generative artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as one of the most rapidly advancing areas of deep learning. The explosion of multimodal models has made them widely associated with text-to-image applications running on large datacentres. However, vision generative models are equally needed in applications that operate under strict hardware constraints at the edge, including autonomous vehicles, agricultural sensors, and mobile devices. In this Perspective, we argue that progress in vision generative AI has been driven by output quality, with hardware evolving reactively to accommodate growing model demands. We quantify the parameter cost and energy efficiency of these models across a range of accelerator platforms, and map four generative model families against seven real-world application domains. Finally, we advocate a software-hardware co-design approach, where deployment constraints are considered from the start of the design process, ensuring that the "right model" runs on the "right hardware" to serve the "right application", making generative AI deployment sustainable and accessible across a much broader range of platforms.
Real-time tiny target perception in high-resolution imagery is critical for embodied Search-and-Rescue (SAR) missions. However, strict Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) constraints on edge devices like UAVs create a bottleneck: traditional image downsampling causes severe feature loss, while slice-based processing incurs prohibitive latency. To address this gap, this paper introduces a comprehensive framework encompassing a novel architecture, specialized datasets, and hardware-level benchmarks. First, we propose MITE-Net, a SWaP-optimized cascaded architecture, which couples a bio-inspired, learning-free Tiny Target Motion-Based Region Proposal Network (TTM-RPN) with a sub-0.14M-parameter R-CNN-like head. Second, to standardize 4K tiny target evaluation, we construct the SAR-Tiny Datasets by relabeling two challenging UAV datasets: SeaDroneSee-Tiny (dynamic maritime scenes, tiny targets predominantly of 64-256 pixels ) and UAVID-Tiny (cluttered urban scenes, extremely tiny targets, less than 64 pixels). Third, we benchmark against state-of-the-art YOLO models on an edge device, NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier, where MITE-Net directly processes 4K maritime imagery, achieving a 100\% search success rate at 30.33 FPS. Consuming merely 3.19 W (9.51 FPS/W), MITE-Net vastly outperforms YOLO baselines in target recall and energy efficiency. Conversely, UAVID-Tiny evaluations expose a compound structural limitation: the learning-free bionic front-end struggles against urban backgrounds, while the ultra-lightweight head lacks representational capacity for complex features. Ultimately, this work delivers an efficient onboard perception paradigm and a rigorous baseline guiding future end-to-end SAR architectures.
Aya Manel Zitouni, Aicha Zenakhri, Karim Haroun +1cs.CV cs.LG
Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) is an important task that has significant implications across various fields such as biometrics, health, and human-computer interaction. Current Vision Transformer-based approaches display quadratic complexity $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$, with N being the input sequence length, making them cumbersome to deploy at the edge. In this paper, we hypothesize that the FER task does not necessarily require all facial information to correctly interpret emotional states, as specific regions such as the eyes, the mouth, and parts of the cheeks carry discriminative information that can be sufficient to recognize emotions. Based on this, we propose Sparse Attention to Emotion (SAE), a model that discards image tokens that have no added value to the emotional context, while preserving good accuracy and achieving a significant gain in computational cost. Surprisingly, even after suppressing 90\% of the image tokens, our model achieves competitive accuracy to state of the art methods at much lower cost, providing a lightweight Facial Emotion Recognition approach. Experimental results demonstrate that SAE achieves new state of the art results on the RAF-DB dataset while reducing the computational complexity by up to 90\%.
Akbar Anbar Jafari, Cagri Ozcinar, Gholamreza Anbarjafarics.CV
Follow-me person tracking must run on the drone itself, where affordable companion computers offer only a few effective int8 GFLOP/s. At typical follow distances a person spans 10-60 pixels, indistinguishable from clutter and beyond the reach of single-frame appearance detectors. The missing evidence is temporal and belongs in the input representation, computed analytically, rather than in learned temporal machinery. EMTS-Det is a five-stage system that estimates ego-motion, converts each frame into ego-motion-normalized residual-motion channels, detects person centers with a 22k-parameter, 7.6-MFLOP network, tracks a locked target with a Kalman filter in stabilized coordinates, and verifies tracks with a 1-D convolutional classifier of human motion (ROC AUC 0.941). Training uses a synthetic-motion curriculum with motion channels generated by the deployed ego-motion code. Multi-seed ablations locate the value in generalization: on held-out VisDrone-DET a luminance-only variant collapses to 0.051 AP25 versus 0.415, as does YOLOv8n fine-tuned identically despite 1,100 times the compute, while the deployed int8 detector reaches 0.694 AP25 in-domain and 0.444 on this split. Temporal-shift modules lower accuracy, so the deployed detector is stateless. Silent int8 calibration failures are documented; min-max calibration with propagated caches matches float within 0.008 AP. On a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W the pipeline runs at 31.85 FPS with 0.462 AP25 and 0.714 recall over 1,000 real-world UAV videos, versus 1.95 FPS and 0.172 AP25 for YOLOv8n. A 57-second field sequence shows auto-lock at 1.3 s, 97.9% lock recall, and recovery from all nine occlusions with zero false re-locks.
Scaling down the resolution of input images can greatly reduce the computational overhead of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which is promising for edge AI. However, as an image usually contains much spatial redundancy, e.g., background pixels, directly shrinking the whole image will lose important features of the foreground object and lead to severe accuracy degradation. In this paper, we propose a dynamic image cropping framework to reduce the spatial redundancy by accurately cropping the foreground object from images. To achieve the instance-aware fine cropping, we introduce a lightweight foreground predictor to efficiently localize and crop the foreground of an image. The finely cropped images can be correctly recognized even at a small resolution. Meanwhile, computational redundancy also exists in CNN architectures. To pursue higher execution efficiency on resource-constrained embedded devices, we also propose a compound shrinking strategy to coordinately compress the three dimensions (depth, width, resolution) of CNNs. Eventually, we seamlessly combine the proposed dynamic image cropping and compound shrinking into a unified compression framework, Smart Scissor, which is expected to significantly reduce the computational overhead of CNNs while still maintaining high accuracy. Experiments on ImageNet-1K demonstrate that our method reduces the computational cost of ResNet50 by 41.5% while improving the top-1 accuracy by 0.3%. Moreover, compared to HRank, the state-of-the-art CNN compression framework, our method achieves 4.1% higher top-1 accuracy at the same computational cost. The codes and data are available at https://github.com/ntuliuteam/smart-scissor
Parsa Hassani Shariat Panahi, Amir Hossein Jalilvand, M. Hassan Najafics.CV cs.AI cs.RO
Line segment detection is a key building block in visual SLAM, 3D reconstruction, and industrial inspection. Recent deep learning methods have greatly improved accuracy, yet even the smallest models require several megabytes of memory, exceeding low-cost MCU capacity. This work investigates the maximum achievable accuracy under a sub-megabyte budget. We propose MiLSD, a detector tailored for MCU-level constraints, and systematically compare three output representations within a compact fully-convolutional backbone. Our study shows that the proposed F-Clip center-with-length-and-angle formulation learns most effectively at small model sizes. We find that 8-bit quantization preserves full-precision performance, while 4-bit quantization causes significant degradation, particularly in angle regression, with quantization-aware training recovering only part of the loss. With a one-megabyte activation budget and inference enhancements including sub-pixel decoding, test-time augmentation, and a lightweight verifier, MiLSD improves sAP10 on ShanghaiTech Wireframe from 10.6 (25k parameters, 0.25 MB) to 24.1 within 1 MB. Rather than competing with GPU-scale parsers, we map the accuracy memory trade-off across representations, bit-widths, capacities, and post-processing strategies for embedded vision systems.
The deployment of large-scale foundation models like Segment Anything Model (SAM) on resource-constrained Earth observation platforms is hindered by prohibitive computational costs and the domain shift between natural and remote sensing imagery. To address these challenges, we propose \textit{Geo}spatial \textit{S}egment \textit{A}nything \textit{M}odel-Lite (GeoSAM-Lite), a lightweight, prompt-free segmentation framework designed for efficient onboard remote sensing segmentation. GeoSAM-Lite incorporates two core innovations: (1) Geospatial-Domain Initialization (Geo-Init), a domain-aware pre-training strategy that distills geospatial priors from a specialized teacher to bridge the domain gap; and (2) Feature Fusion Layers (FFL), which recalibrate spatial features and restore high-frequency boundary cues to overcome the capacity bottlenecks of lightweight backbones. Experiments across representative datasets, with a primary focus on cloud scenarios to evaluate performance under extreme scale variations and complex boundaries, demonstrate that GeoSAM-Lite achieves competitive accuracy while reducing parameters by 92.8\% compared to the heavyweight RSAM-Seg. By establishing a superior Pareto frontier between efficiency and fidelity, GeoSAM-Lite offers a practical solution for real-time segmentation on edge devices.
Face recognition systems have advanced significantly through deep learning techniques, delivering high performance and robustness in complex scenarios. However, these approaches incur substantial computational overhead, limiting their in situ applicability in resource-constrained platforms such as drones, where they can address challenges including non-frontal facial imagery. Memristor-based neuromorphic systems have emerged as a compelling approach for edge AI applications, combining biologically inspired processing with efficient and scalable computation. In this work, we propose a facial recognition framework that addresses non-frontal pose variations by integrating lightweight generative adversarial network (GAN)-based pose frontalisation with memristor-based neuromorphic recognition. The experimental results on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of combining adversarial learning with memristive technology, achieving up to 96% identification accuracy. The proposed approach alleviates the computational bottlenecks of conventional AI and offers a scalable, efficient solution for face recognition in dynamic real-world environments.
Shreyas Narasimhiah Ramesh, P. D. Rathika, Mahasweta Sarkar +3cs.CV
Background and Objective: Falls among elderly people can cause serious injury and reduce quality of life. Timely prediction and detection are essential to prevent harm and support well-being. We propose a portable, low-power, battery-operated, vision-based fall prediction and detection system using HPE on an AMD Kria K26 System-on-Module (SOM). The objective is a non-intrusive, privacy-preserving system for real-time fall detection. Methods: The system uses an Intel RealSense D455 range-sensing camera connected to the K26 SOM by USB. It captures synchronized RGB and depth frames, 640 x 480 x 3 and 640 x 480 pixels, at 60 FPS. The SOM runs a three-stage pipeline with quantized YOLOX, Anchor-to-Joint (A2J), and fall-detection models. YOLOX identifies human bounding boxes from RGB frames, then discards the RGB frames to preserve privacy. A2J uses depth frames to estimate 15 joint keypoints per person. A CNN uses selected joint coordinates (x, y, z) to classify fall activity. YOLOX was trained on CrowdHuman; A2J on ITOP, MP-3DHP, UR Fall Detection, and a custom SDSU PSG dataset; and the CNN on UR Fall Detection and SDSU PSG. The design used a single-core DPU with a serial pipeline and a dual-core DPU running YOLOX and A2J with multiple threads. Results: Quantized accuracy was evaluated using IoU >= 50% for YOLOX, mAP with a 10-cm rule for A2J, and classification accuracy, (TP + TN)/(TP + TN + FP + FN), for the CNN. Accuracies were 74%, 84.13%, and 75.85%. Throughput improved from 2.5 FPS for the single-threaded pipeline to 4.5 FPS for the multi-threaded version. Conclusion: Results demonstrate the feasibility of privacy-preserving fall detection on an AMD Kria K26 edge device. On-device HPE and fall classification runs without cloud dependency, supporting elderly monitoring and assistive healthcare. Future work will improve model accuracy and speed.
Daniel Vila-Cruz, Laura Morán-Fernández, Verónica Bolón-Canedocs.LG cs.AI
We present HydraCIL, a decoupled continual learning model based on prototype-guided multi-head classifiers, targeting sustainable deployment in embedded and resource-constrained environments. While most Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) methods rely on powerful hardware and long retraining cycles, real-world systems, such as robots or edge AI devices, must adapt quickly with limited resources. HydraCIL addresses this gap by freezing the backbone and decoupling feature extraction from learning. For each task, features are extracted once and a lightweight, task-specific classifier head is created, avoiding costly backbone retraining. At inference, HydraCIL selects the appropriate head via similarity with prototypes. Experiments on CIFAR-100, ImageNet-100, CoRe50, and Flowers102 datasets show that HydraCIL matches or outperforms state-of-the-art CIL methods while significantly reducing training time and carbon footprint, making it a practical solution for continual learning in real-world and embedded settings, where energy efficiency and rapid adaptation are critical.
Blind face restoration on consumer devices has to balance image quality against speed and memory. Strong methods such as GFPGAN and CodeFormer give good perceptual quality, but they rely on large pretrained generative priors and on operators such as attention, codebook lookup, and style modulation that are hard to compile and quantize on the small neural processing units (NPUs) used in consumer hardware. Small convolutional restorers run fast enough, but they tend to over-smooth and to leave artifacts around the eyes, nose, and mouth. We present CFRNet, a 2.0,M-parameter ResNet-style restorer for on-device use at $256\times256$, the common face-crop size on consumer NPUs. The main idea is Cycle-Consistent Fixed-Point Training (CCFP). Instead of training the network for one pass and then running it several times by hand, we train it to act as a fixed-point operator, so that applying it again to a restored face does not change the face. CCFP uses three training losses, namely progressive multi-cycle supervision, an idempotence loss, and a re-degradation cycle loss, and it adds no cost at inference. To compare fairly under our deployment limits, we retrain all baselines from scratch at the same $256\times256$ resolution. On a 300-image test set, CFRNet reaches the best perceptual score (LPIPS 0.250 at three cycles, which is 31% lower than one cycle) and also the best PSNR and SSIM at two cycles. It runs in about 23,ms per cycle in INT8 on a HiSilicon Hi3402 NPU, while the same baselines cannot be compiled to that chip. The cycle count $k$ acts as a simple quality knob that needs no retraining: PSNR is best at $k\!=\!2$ and LPIPS keeps improving up to $k\!=\!3$. We further show that the same idea works with a plain CNN that is even easier to deploy, and we run the model in real time on an in-car driver-monitoring board.
Chieh-Tung Cheng, Mustafa Aslanov, Eiman Kanjocs.CV
Edge AI nodes for search and rescue are increasingly expected to run computer vision locally, yet ultra-low-end hardware imposes hard constraints on memory, compute, and inter-device communication. This work addresses occlusion-robust object detection on devices with less than 1 MB SRAM by combining an MCUNet backbone, a YOLOv2 detection head, and Lite quantisation. Two collaborative inference strategies are evaluated: feature-level fusion, concatenating intermediate feature maps, and decision-level fusion via Weighted Boxes Fusion (WBF). WBF outperforms feature-level fusion under all tested occlusion conditions, yielding gains of up to +0.2736 mAP in asymmetric scenarios. Extending fusion to three views improves accuracy further (up to +0.3827 mAP) at modest communication overhead (~1.3 KB per exchange). Hardware experiments progress from a host-assisted USB-relay baseline to a Wi-Fi peer-to-peer deployment on two Coral Dev Board Micro units, where WBF executes on-device with negligible communication energy relative to inference. In a 301.9 s autonomous session of 108 frames, fused output is produced on 61 frames versus 47 for a single board - a coverage gain of +29.8%. A decentralised federated learning feasibility note is included but not treated as a primary result, as performance remains limited under non-iid data. The results support decision-level fusion as a viable option for improving occlusion robustness in small-scale edge object detection, including host-free multi-board operation on ultra-low-end hardware.
Szymon Ruciński, Pietro Bonazzi, Engin Türetken +3cs.CV
Ternary Vision Transformers offer substantial model compression, however state-of-the-art methods only ternarize the encoder layers, leaving patch embeddings, LayerNorm parameters, and classifier heads in full precision. In compact models targeting resource-constrained processors, such as microcontrollers, these remaining full-precision components determine the total memory footprint, severely limiting deployment efficiency and on-device feasibility. In this work, we introduce a fully ternarized Vision Transformer in which \emph{all} weight matrices and normalization parameters are ternarized (FTerViT). To this end, we introduce two novel operators : TernaryBitConv2d with per-channel scaling for patch embedding and TernaryLayerNorm. FTerViT is trained using knowledge distillation, followed by a lightweight quantization-aware recovery phase. Our ternary W2A8 DeiT-III-S at 384$\times$384 resolution achieves 82.43\% ImageNet-1K top-1 at 6.09\,MB (${\sim}$15$\times$ compression, $-$2.42\,pp vs.\ FP32), outperforming prior ternary ViTs methods up to 8 pp. Finally, we demonstrate the first implementation of ternary vision transformers on a dual cores XTensa LX7 microcontroller inside the ESP32-S3 system-on-chip. By deploying FTerViT-Small (based on DeiT-III-Small at 224$\times$224 resolution, 5.81\,MB), we achieve 79.64\% ImageNet-1K top-1 accuracy.
Place recognition is essential for long-term autonomous navigation, enabling loop closure and consistent mapping. Although deep learning has improved performance, deploying such models on resource-constrained platforms remains challenging. This work explores efficient LiDAR-based place recognition for EdgeAI by leveraging Bird's Eye View representations to enable lightweight image-based networks. We benchmark representative architectures without aggregation heads using a unified descriptor scheme based on global pooling and linear projection, and evaluate performance under FP32, FP16, and INT8 quantization. Experiments reveal trade-offs between accuracy, robustness, and efficiency: FP16 matches FP32 with lower cost, while INT8 introduces architecture-dependent degradation. Overall, the presented results are a strong basis for future research on 'use-case'-aware quantisation of Neural Networks for Edge deployment.
Akshay Karjol, Darrin M. Hannacs.CV cs.LG cs.RO eess.IV
Deploying accurate object detection for Vulnerable Road User (VRU) safety on edge hardware requires balancing model capacity against computational constraints. Large models achieve high accuracy but fail under INT8 quantization required for edge deployment, while small models sacrifice detection performance. This paper presents a knowledge distillation (KD) framework that trains a compact YOLOv8-S student (11.2M parameters) to mimic a YOLOv8-L teacher (43.7M parameters), achieving 3.9x compression while preserving quantization robustness. We evaluate on full-scale BDD100K (70K training images) with Post-Training Quantization to INT8. The teacher suffers catastrophic degradation under INT8 (-23% mAP), while the KD student retains accuracy (-5.6% mAP). Analysis reveals that KD transfers precision calibration rather than raw detection capacity: the KD student achieves 0.748 precision versus 0.653 for direct training at INT8, a 14.5% gain at equivalent recall, reducing false alarms by 44% versus the collapsed teacher. At INT8, the KD student exceeds the teacher's FP32 precision (0.748 vs. 0.718) in a model 3.9x smaller. These findings establish knowledge distillation as a requirement for deploying accurate, safety-critical VRU detection on edge hardware.