US Patent 9904874 Hardware-efficient deep convolutional neural networks

Systems, methods, and computer media for implementing convolutional neural networks efficiently in hardware are disclosed herein. A memory is configured to store a sparse, frequency domain representation of a convolutional weighting kernel. A time-domain-to-frequency-domain converter is configured to generate a frequency domain representation of an input image. A feature extractor is configured to access the memory and, by a processor, extract features based on the sparse, frequency domain representation of the convolutional weighting kernel and the frequency domain representation of the input image. The feature extractor includes convolutional layers and fully connected layers. A classifier is configured to determine, based on extracted features, whether the input image contains an object of interest. Various types of memory can be used to store different information, allowing information-dense data to be stored in faster (e.g., faster access time) memory and sparse data to be stored in slower memory.