Face Recognition and People Counting on the Edge

The Challenge

Footfall and customer behavior is an important data metric for retailers across the globe. Footfall can give information on the results of a marketing strategy, conversion rates, and advertising effects.

Intelligence such as prime traffic times, counters with maximum footfall can result in strategic decisions taken by the retailers on labor resources and marketing spend. For retailers, traffic count defines sales, and every retailer store is looking at maximizing this number.

The intelligence generated through this data can help retailers increase their sales, improve operational efficiency and enhance the customer experience.

ARM + FPGA Architecture                                                               8 IP Cameras Connectivity
Integrated DPU &Vitis™ AI stack                                                   Extended Storage & Recording
Wi-Fi / 4G Communication                                                           Easy to use API

Solution

With a growing requirement for taking decisions on the edge and data privacy concerns, there is a requirement for intelligent devices capable of taking real-time decisions. Catering to this requirement, iWave has developed Corazon-AI, An Edge AI platform

Corazon-AI provides software developers and system integrators an ideal platform to develop AI applications on the edge. With the Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC series providing the feature to connect 8 IP Cameras and the Xilinx Vitis™ AI stack integrated, Corazon-AI provides for an ideal fit helping build intelligence on the edge. The Xilinx Vitis AI Stack includes advanced pre-optimized deep learning models from the mainstream frameworks such as Tensor-flow, Caffe, Darknet, and Computer Vision Libraries. The Xilinx Vitis AI Stack enables developers to accelerate the development flow of AI applications even without in depth-knowledge of FPGA and deep learning. The Stack support C++/python API’s which provides programming flexibility to the developers.

Corazon-AI powers a dedicated AI inference engine and Deep learning processing unit(DPU) implemented on the programmable logic(PL) side of the device. The AI inference engine has a configurable computation engine optimized for convolution neural networks (CNN) such as SSD, Yolo, Resnet, VGG, etc.

Face Recognition and People Counting on Corazon-AI

The application on Corazon-AI was developed based on the parallel computation architecture that was optimized to provide accurate face recognition and people counting models. The high-resolution video stream interface, such as USB, HD-SDI, IP camera, and stored video file was provided as an input to Corazon-AI. The pre-processing functions like decoding and video scaling (as per CNN algorithm requirements) are implemented on FPGA to accelerate the performance of the application.