As the semester is wrapping up, this week was very busy in terms of workload and addressing issues that came up. At the beginning of the week, I was doing research on CAD designs for our FPGA board – a kind of holder that wraps around the board to prevent static discharges, something that my team and I had looked into last week. Since none of us on our team really had much CAD experience, it was a process which was more time-consuming than expected. I ended up asking a friend who had more CAD experience that me to teach me, and I had a design finalized for the board.
However, our group quickly ran into a bigger problem, which was that our end-to-end latency was a lot higher than we had initially calculated it to be. The main problem was that although our throughput was close to meeting our requirements, our end-to-end latency is significantly higher than what we wanted for it to be ‘real-time’, i.e. a delay of less than 30ms. To address this, a smaller model was needed, but that would come at the cost of quality for our final upscaled videos. We had to decide whether or not the sacrifice to quality was worth it, or take the hit in terms of latency and justify why that was the better choice overall.
I talked through the problem with James and Kunal, and we were thinking about ideas such as training a single-layered CNN from scratch, which was still possible with the time we had left but cutting it very close, or looking at other solutions. In the end, I prepared a smaller model which was still had 3 layers, but with drastically less filters, and started training that in parallel with our other initial model, by training the new model on my GPU and having the training for our initial model continue on Google Colab. I aim to fully address this issue in the coming week, and coordinate with James to ensure that we’ll have at least a final working product, even if it doesn’t meet our initial requirements.
In terms of the final presentation and the final report, I’ve started working on the former and continuing work from last week on the latter, since I will be the one presenting next week.