DAC-SDC Low Power Object Detection Challenge for UAV Applications

The 55th Design Automation Conference (DAC) held its first System Design Contest (SDC) in 2018. SDC18 features a lower power object detection challenge (LPODC) on designing and implementing novel algorithms based object detection in images taken from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The dataset includes 95 categories and 150k images, and the hardware platforms include Nvidias TX2 and Xilinxs PYNQ Z1. DAC-SDC18 attracted more than 110 entries from 12 countries. This paper presents in detail the dataset and evaluation procedure. It further discusses the methods developed by some of the entries as well as representative results. The paper concludes with directions for future improvements.