An Open-Source Tool for Classification Models in Resource-Constrained Hardware

Abstract-- Applications that need to sense, measure, and gather real-time information from the environment frequently face three main restrictions: power consumption, cost, and lack of infrastructure. Most of the challenges imposed by these limitations can be better addressed by embedding Machine Learning (ML) classifiers in the hardware that senses the environment, creating smart sensors able to interpret the low-level data stream. However, for this approach to be cost-effective, we need highly efficient classifiers suitable to execute in unresourceful hardware, such as low-power microcontrollers. In this paper, we present an open-source tool named EmbML - Embedded Machine Learning that implements a pipeline to develop classifiers for resource-constrained hardware. We describe its implementation details and provide a comprehensive analysis of its classifiers considering accuracy, classification time, and memory usage. Moreover, we compare the performance of its classifiers with classifiers produced by related tools to demonstrate that our tool provides a diverse set of classification algorithms that are both compact and accurate. Therefore, these smart sensors are more powerefficient since they eliminate the need for communicating all the raw data. PPLICATIONS that need to sense, measure, and gather real-time information from the environment frequently of interest - e.g., a dry soil crop area that needs watering or face three main restrictions [1]: power consumption, cost, the capture of a disease-vector mosquito.