SparseTem: Boosting the Efficiency of CNN-Based Video Encoders by Exploiting Temporal Continuity

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are an efficient and high-performance choice for feature extraction and encoding. However, the intensive computational demands of convolution operations hinder its broader adoption as a video encoder. Given the temporal continuity in video frames, changes between consecutive frames are minimal, allowing for the skipping of redundant computations. This technique, which we term as Diff Computation, presents two primary challenges. First, Diff Computation requires to cache intermediate feature maps to ensure the correctness of non-linear computations, leading to significant memory consumption. Second, the imbalance of sparsity among layers, introduced by Diff Computation, incurs accuracy degradation. To address these issues, we propose a memory-efficient scheduling method to eliminate memory overhead and an online adjustment mechanism to minimize accuracy degradation. We integrate these techniques into SparseTem, a unified framework for CNN-based video encoders. SparseTem achieves speedup of 1.79x for EfficientDet and 4.72x for CRNN, with minimal accuracy drop and no additional memory overhead, setting a new state-of-the-art in leveraging temporal redundancy for acceleration.