A Hardware Accelerator for Real-Time Processing Platforms Used in Synthetic Aperture Radar Target Detection Tasks

TL;DR

This paper presents a low-power hardware accelerator for real-time SAR target detection using deep learning, suitable for airborne and satellite platforms.

Contribution

The novel contribution is a low-power, FPGA-based accelerator optimized for SAR object detection with reduced latency and power consumption.

Findings

The accelerator consumes only 7 watts of dynamic power.

It can detect 52.19 SAR images per second at 512 × 512 resolution.

The design uses a Process Engine and optimized memory arrangement for efficient FPGA computing.

Abstract

The deep learning object detection algorithm has been widely applied in the field of synthetic aperture radar (SAR). By utilizing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and other techniques, these algorithms can effectively identify and locate targets in SAR images, thereby improving the accuracy and efficiency of detection. In recent years, achieving real-time monitoring of regions has become a pressing need, leading to the direct completion of real-time SAR image target detection on airborne or satellite-borne real-time processing platforms. However, current GPU-based real-time processing platforms struggle to meet the power consumption requirements of airborne or satellite applications. To address this issue, a low-power, low-latency deep learning SAR object detection algorithm accelerator was designed in this study to enable real-time target detection on airborne and satellite SAR platforms. This accelerator proposes a Process Engine (PE) suitable for multidimensional convolution parallel computing, making full use of Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) computing resources to reduce convolution computing time. Furthermore, a unique memory arrangement design based on this PE aims to enhance memory read/write efficiency while applying dataflow patterns suitable for FPGA computing to the accelerator to reduce computation latency. Our experimental results demonstrate that deploying the SAR object detection algorithm based on Yolov5s on this accelerator design, mounted on a Virtex 7 690t chip, consumes only 7 watts of dynamic power, achieving the capability to detect 52.19 512 × 512-sized SAR images per second.

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