FoveaDet: Software-Hardware Co-Design of Foveated CNN-Transformer for Object Detection

arXiv:2611.15579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deploying real-time object detection on power-constrained edge platforms is challenging as processing full-resolution frames is often computationally redundant. Inspired by biological foveation which assigns variable resolution based on visual saliency, we propose a novel software-hardware co-design framework called FoveaDet. On the software side, FoveaDet dynamically identifies salient regions to predict fixation points, followed by aggressive patch pruning in Vision Transformers (ViT) to discard irrelevant background data. To mitigate slowdowns from sequential patch generation, we implement optimized interpolation and patch selection algorithms. Evaluated on standard GPUs, this foveated approach reduces floating-point operations by 65.4% to 92.2% and accelerates inference by 4.76x, while suffering a negligible mAP drop compared to dense baselines. To eliminate hardware bottlenecks, we complement the algorithm with a custom RISC-V core featuring specialized instructions to accelerate the foveated processing pipeline. FoveaDet provides a scalable, efficient architecture capable of unlocking advanced vision processing on severely constrained mobile platforms.