FPGA-Based CNN Acceleration on Zynq-7020 for Embedded Ship Recognition in Unmanned Surface Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper proposes an energy-efficient FPGA-based CNN acceleration system for ship recognition in unmanned surface vehicles.

Contribution

A hardware–software co-design for CNN acceleration on ARM–FPGA systems optimized for embedded maritime applications.

Findings

The FPGA-based architecture achieves efficient throughput and resource utilization on Zynq-7020.

The system demonstrates practical performance for onboard ship recognition under tight SWaP constraints.

AXI-Stream dataflow and line-buffered convolutions enable energy-efficient near-sensor processing.

Abstract

Unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) increasingly rely on vision-based perception for safe navigation and maritime surveillance, while onboard computing is constrained by strict size, weight, and power (SWaP) budgets. Although deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) offer strong recognition performance, their computational and memory requirements pose significant challenges for deployment on low-cost embedded platforms. This paper presents a hardware–software co-design architecture and deployment study for CNN acceleration on a heterogeneous ARM–FPGA system, targeting energy-efficient near-sensor processing for embedded maritime applications. The proposed approach exploits a fully streaming hardware architecture in the FPGA fabric, based on line-buffered convolutions and AXI-Stream dataflow, while the ARM processing system is responsible for lightweight configuration, scheduling, and data movement. The architecture was evaluated using representative CNN models trained on a maritime ship dataset. Our experimental results on a Zynq-7020 system-on-chip demonstrate that the proposed co-design strategy achieves a balanced trade-off between throughput, resource utilisation, and power consumption under tight embedded constraints, highlighting its suitability as a practical building block for onboard perception in USVs.

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