PASS: Patch Automatic Skip Scheme for Efficient On-Device Video Perception

Real-time video perception tasks are often challenging on resource-constrained edge devices due to the issues of accuracy drop and hardware overhead, where saving computations is the key to performance improvement. Existing methods either rely on domain-specific neural chips or priorly searched models, which require specialized optimization according to different task properties. These limitations motivate us to design a general and task-independent methodology, called Patch Automatic Skip Scheme (PASS), which supports diverse video perception settings by decoupling acceleration and tasks. The gist is to capture inter-frame correlations and skip redundant computations at patch level, where the patch is a non-overlapping square block in visual. PASS equips each convolution layer with a learnable gate to selectively determine which patches could be safely skipped without degrading model accuracy. Specifically, we are the first to construct a self-supervisory procedure for gate optimization, which learns to extract contrastive representations from frame sequences. The pre-trained gates can serve as plug-and-play modules to implement patch-skippable neural backbones, and automatically generate proper skip strategy to accelerate different video-based downstream tasks, e.g., outperforming state-of-the-art MobileHumanPose in 3D pose estimation and FairMOT in multiple object tracking, by up to 9.43 x and 12.19x speedups, respectively, on NVIDIA Jetson Nano devices.