Enhancing Embedded Object Tracking: A Hardware Acceleration Approach for Real-Time Predictability

While Siamese object tracking has witnessed significant advancements, its hard real-time behaviour on embedded devices remains inadequately addressed. In many application cases, an embedded implementation should not only have a minimal execution latency, but this latency should ideally also have zero variance, i.e., be predictable. This study aims to address this issue by meticulously analysing real-time predictability across different components of a deep-learning-based video object tracking system. Our detailed experiments not only indicate the superiority of Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementations in terms of hard real-time behaviour but also unveil important time predictability bottlenecks. We introduce dedicated hardware accelerators for key processes, focusing on depth-wise cross-correlation and padding operations, utilizing high-level synthesis (HLS). Implemented on a KV260 board, our enhanced tracker exhibits not only a speed up, with a factor of 6.6, in mean execution time but also significant improvements in hard real-time predictability by yielding 11 times less latency variation as compared to our baseline. A subsequent analysis of power consumption reveals our approach's contribution to enhanced power efficiency. These advancements underscore the crucial role of hardware acceleration in realizing time-predictable object tracking on embedded systems, setting new standards for future hardware-software co-design endeavours in this domain.