Case Study: Facial Detection and Recognition for Always-On Applications

Although there are many applications for low-power facial recognition in edge devices, perhaps the most challenging to design are always-on, battery-powered systems that use facial recognition for access control. Laptop, tablet and cellphone users expect hands-free and instantaneous facial recognition. This means the electronics must be always on, constantly looking to detect a face, and then ready to pull from a data set to recognize the face. This presentation will describe the challenges of moving traditional facial detection neural networks to the edge. It will explore a case study of a face recognition access control application requiring continuous operation and extreme energy efficiency. Finally, it will describe how the combination of Synopsys DesignWare ARC EM and EV processors provides low-power, efficient DSP and CNN acceleration for this application.