SHIELD8-UAV: Sequential 8-bit Hardware Implementation of a Precision-Aware 1D-F-CNN for Low-Energy UAV Acoustic Detection and Temporal Tracking

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01069v1
• Date: Sun, 01 Mar 2026 12:09:15 GMT
• Title: SHIELD8-UAV: Sequential 8-bit Hardware Implementation of a Precision-Aware 1D-F-CNN for Low-Energy UAV Acoustic Detection and Temporal Tracking
• Authors: Susmita Ghanta, Karan Nathwani, Rohit Chaurasiya,
• Abstract summary: SHIELD8-UAV is a sequential 8-bit hardware implementation of a precision-aware 1D feature-driven CNN accelerator.<n>The design performs layer-wise execution on a shared multi-precision datapath, eliminating the need for replicated processing elements.<n>Results show that sequential execution combined with precision-aware quantisation and serialisation-aware pruning enables practical low-energy edge inference.
• Score: 4.962717354668883
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Real-time unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) acoustic detection at the edge demands low-latency inference under strict power and hardware limits. This paper presents SHIELD8-UAV, a sequential 8-bit hardware implementation of a precision-aware 1D feature-driven CNN (1D-F-CNN) accelerator for continuous acoustic monitoring. The design performs layer-wise execution on a shared multi-precision datapath, eliminating the need for replicated processing elements. A layer-sensitivity quantisation framework supports FP32, BF16, INT8, and FXP8 modes, while structured channel pruning reduces the flattened feature dimension from 35,072 to 8,704 (75%), thereby lowering serialised dense-layer cycles. The model achieves 89.91% detection accuracy in FP32 with less than 2.5% degradation in 8-bit modes. The accelerator uses 2,268 LUTs and 0.94 W power with 116 ms end-to-end latency, achieving 37.8% and 49.6% latency reduction compared with QuantMAC and LPRE, respectively, on a Pynq-Z2 FPGA, and 5-9% lower logic usage than parallel designs. ASIC synthesis in UMC 40 nm technology shows a maximum operating frequency of 1.56 GHz, 3.29 mm2 core area, and 1.65 W total power. These results demonstrate that sequential execution combined with precision-aware quantisation and serialisation-aware pruning enables practical low-energy edge inference without relying on massive parallelism.

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