An embedded system for handwritten digit recognition

The goal of this work is the design and implementation of a low-cost system-on-FPGA for handwritten digit recognition, based on a relatively deep and wide network of perceptrons. In order to increase the performance of the application on embedded processors whose performances are way below standard general purpose CPUs, a regularization method was used during the training phase of the neural network that allows for the drastic reduction of floating point operations. Our implementation achieves a 3×× speed-up toward a raw implementation without optimization, while keeping the accuracy in acceptable ranges. Our efforts reinforce the fact that FPGAs are suited for deploying complex artificial intelligence modules.