Leveraging Simultaneous Usage of Edge GPU Hardware Engines for Video Face Detection and Recognition

TL;DR

This paper presents a framework that leverages all hardware engines in edge GPUs for concurrent video face detection and recognition, improving throughput and power efficiency in real-time applications.

Contribution

It introduces a unified, automated approach to utilize all GPU hardware engines simultaneously for face detection, recognition, and decoding tasks at the edge.

Findings

Higher throughput achieved on NVIDIA edge Orin GPU

Power consumption reduced by around 5%

Performance improves with multiple video streams

Abstract

Video face detection and recognition in public places at the edge is required in several applications, such as security reinforcement and contactless access to authorized venues. This paper aims to maximize the simultaneous usage of hardware engines available in edge GPUs nowadays by leveraging the concurrency and pipelining of tasks required for face detection and recognition. This also includes the video decoding task, which is required in most face monitoring applications as the video streams are usually carried via Gbps Ethernet network. This constitutes an improvement over previous works where the tasks are usually allocated to a single engine due to the lack of a unified and automated framework that simultaneously explores all hardware engines. In addition, previously, the input faces were usually embedded in still images or within raw video streams that overlook the burst delay caused by the decoding stage. The results on real-life video streams suggest that simultaneously using all the hardware engines available in the recent NVIDIA edge Orin GPU, higher throughput, and a slight saving of power consumption of around 300 mW, accounting for around 5%, have been achieved while satisfying the real-time performance constraint. The performance gets even higher by considering several video streams simultaneously. Further performance improvement could have been obtained if the number of shuffle layers that were created by the tensor RT framework for the face recognition task was lower. Thus, the paper suggests some hardware improvements to the existing edge GPU processors to enhance their performance even higher.