Systems and methods of buffering and accessing input data for convolution computations

Abstract

Using a buffer sized according to the size of the filters of a convolutional neural network (CNN), a processor may use a read pointer to generate a two-dimensional virtual matrix of inputs. The number of inputs in each row in the two-dimensional virtual matrix of inputs may match the one-dimensional filter size of the cubic filters. The processor may collapse each of the cubic filters to one-dimensional linear arrays and generate a two-dimensional filter matrix from the one-dimensional linear arrays. The convolution computations for a corresponding layer of the CNN therefore reduce to a single matrix multiplication without any memory movement operations. When the buffer is refreshed using a new input frame, the processor may increment the initial read address of each read pointer by one and increment the final read address by one, circling back to the corresponding initial read address.