Pre-Computing Batch Normalisation Parameters for Edge Devices on a Binarized Neural Network

Binarized Neural Network (BNN) is a quantized Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), reducing the precision of network parameters for a much smaller model size. In BNNs, the Batch Normalisation (BN) layer is essential. When running BN on edge devices, floating point instructions take up a significant number of cycles to perform. This work leverages the fixed nature of a model during inference, to reduce the full-precision memory footprint by half. This was achieved by pre-computing the BN parameters prior to quantization. The proposed BNN was validated through modeling the network on the MNIST dataset. Compared to the traditional method of computation, the proposed BNN reduced the memory utilization by 63% at 860-bytes without any significant impact on accuracy. By pre-computing portions of the BN layer, the number of cycles required to compute is reduced to two cycles on an edge device.