为嵌入式设备设计了高效神经特征提取器,兼顾精度与资源限制。
Hardware-Aware Neural Feature Extraction for Resource-Constrained Devices

- 结合知识蒸馏与可微架构搜索,优化硬件适配性。
- 在STM32N6上实现111帧/秒、1.5MB内存占用的推理速度。
- 量化后性能几乎无损,适合低功耗视觉系统部署。
视觉SLAM是空间计算系统的核心组件,但将学习型局部特征提取器部署于微控制器级硬件仍面临内存、带宽和量化约束的挑战。尽管现代神经描述子具备强鲁棒性,其实际应用常受限于未被FLOP指标捕捉的系统级瓶颈。本文提出Gideon,一种专为资源受限设备设计的硬件感知神经特征提取器。方法结合来自SuperPoint教师模型的关系知识蒸馏与在严格内存和算子约束下的可微架构搜索(DNAS)。不同于传统设计流程,我们将量化稳定性与动态范围紧凑性作为首要目标。实验表明,用仿射层替代批归一化显著提升INT8鲁棒性,且描述子维度直接影响量化韧性。在STM32N6上,Gideon实现9.003毫秒推理时间(111帧/秒),内存低于1.5MB。值得注意的是,INT8量化带来的性能下降可忽略不计,甚至偶尔优于全精度表现。结果表明,通过软硬件协同设计,可在嵌入式环境中实现高鲁棒性学习特征提取。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Visual SLAM is a core component of spatial computing systems, yet deploying learned local feature extractors on microcontroller-class hardware remains challenging due to memory, bandwidth, and quantization constraints. While modern neural descriptors provide strong robustness, their practical adoption is often hindered by system-level bottlenecks that are not captured by FLOP-based efficiency metrics. In this work, we introduce Gideon, a hardware-aware neural feature extractor explicitly designed for resource-constrained devices. Our approach combines relational knowledge distillation from a SuperPoint teacher with differentiable neural architecture search (DNAS) under strict memory and operator constraints. Unlike conventional design pipelines, we treat quantization stability and dynamic-range compactness as first-class objectives. We show that architectural choices such as replacing Batch Normalization with affine layers significantly improve INT8 robustness, and that descriptor dimensionality directly governs quantization resilience. Deployed on STM32N6, Gideon achieves 9.003 ms inference time (111 fps) while remaining below a 1.5 MB memory footprint. Remarkably, INT8 quantization induces negligible degradation and occasionally matches full-precision performance. These results demonstrate that robust learned feature extraction can be reconciled with embedded hardware constraints through holistic hardware-algorithm co-design.
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