Weekly Recap

recap
A summary of what I’ve been working on for the past week.
Author

Christian Mills

Published

April 25, 2021

Introduction

Well I would like to say that I have had a super productive month. Unfortunately, I have hardly been able to work on anything at all. At least I’m done with finals now so, hopefully, I’ll be able to make up for it.

Experimenting with AsyncGPUReadback

In preparation for updating the PoseNet tutorial, I took another shot at getting around the performance bottleneck of reading the model output from the GPU. This time, I tried using the AsyncGPUReadback class. Keijiro Takahashi who works at Unity Technologies Japan had a small demo project on GitHub that I was able to learn from. As the name suggests, it allows you to read data from the GPU without blocking the main thread. I was successfully able to read model output back from the GPU using this method by first copying it to a RenderTexture. There was essentially no performance cost so I was pretty excited. Unfortunately, this approach does not seem feasible at least for the PoseNet model. The Barracuda library does not seem to support reading model output to a 3-dimensional RenderTexture. That means the model output needs to be sliced up and read separately. This approach does not scale well and the PoseNet model actually has a lot of outputs. I did go through the effort creating separate slices for each key point predicted by the model. However, there was actually a significant performance hit when reading from the GPU so many times. It would probably work fine for a model with only 2-dimensional outputs or only a few 3-dimensional ones. I’ll have to try it out with a simple image classifier.

Pixel Effects with JavaScript and HTML Canvas

I’ve started thinking of ways to personalize my blog a bit. That lead me to this tutorial on freeCodeCamp. The tutorial shows how to create pixel rain effects and interactive particle effects from scratch with vanilla JavaScript. I don’t have much experience with JavaScript so it was really fun learning about some of the more artistic applications. I recommend checking out the creator’s personal YouTube channel.

Conclusion

Well it’s been just over a month since my first “daily recap” and I have not posted any since. That first week turned out to be rather poor timing, but I don’t have any excuses for the rest of the month. I’m going to try starting fresh tomorrow.