ViraEye: an Energy-Efficient Stereo Vision Accelerator with Binary Neural Network in 55 Nm CMOS

This paper presents the ViraEye chip, an energy-efficient stereo vision accelerator based on the binary neural network (BNN) to achieve high-quality and real-time stereo estimation. This stereo vision accelerator is designed as an end-to-end full pipeline architecture where all processing procedures, including stereo rectification, BNNs, cost aggregation and post-processing, are implemented on the ViraEye chip. ViraEye allows for top level pipelining between accelerator and image sensors, and no external CPUs or GPUs are required. The accelerator is implemented using SMIC 55nm CMOS technology and achieves top-performing processing speed in terms of million disparity estimations per second (MDE/s) metric among the existing ASIC in the open literature.