This paper proposes a high-performance and energy-efficient optical near-sensor accelerator for vision applications, called Lightator. Harnessing the promising efficiency offered by photonic devices, Lightator features innovative compressive acquisition of input frames and fine-grained convolution operations for low-power and versatile image processing at the edge for the first time. This will substantially diminish the energy consumption and latency of conversion, transmission, and processing within the established cloud-centric architecture as well as recently designed edge accelerators. Our device-to-architecture simulation results show that with favorable accuracy, Lightator achieves 84.4 Kilo FPS/W and reduces power consumption by a factor of ~24x and 73x on average compared with existing photonic accelerators and GPU baseline.

翻译：本文提出一种面向视觉应用的高性能、高能效光学近传感器加速器——Lightator。该加速器利用光子器件提供的显著效率优势，首次在边缘端创新性地实现了输入帧的压缩采集与细粒度卷积操作，支持低功耗多功能图像处理。这将显著降低现有云中心架构及近年设计的边缘加速器中转换、传输与处理环节的能耗与时延。我们的器件到架构联合仿真结果表明，在保持良好精度的前提下，Lightator可实现84.4千帧/秒/瓦的处理吞吐率，与现有光子加速器及GPU基线相比，平均功耗分别降低约24倍和73倍。