Alpha-Vision: A Real-Time Always-on Vision Processor with 787µs Face Detection Latency in <5mW

ALPhA-Vision is an always-on low-power subsystem for DNN-inference-based vision tasks in edge SoCs. Flexible and programmable, the subsystem supports CNN and ViT inference and employs hardware/software co-design to enable fully end-to-end execution with no external memory accesses. Fine-grained power management features to mitigate leakage enable the subsystem to perform face detection with 787µs latency and 99.3% detection accuracy with 4.6 mW average power at 60fps.