Reference Design Overview

Reference Design Overview#

Vitis AI includes a reference design that integrates hardware-accelerated pre-processing with machine learning inference on the Neural Processing Unit (NPU). This design demonstrates a complete, end-to-end pipeline, from ingesting image or video inputs to producing and saving the inference results.

Supported Features:#

  • Hardware-accelerated pre-processing via the Image Processing PL kernel, including resizing, color space conversion, normalization, and cropping.

  • Inference execution on the NPU.

  • Software-based post-processing on the CPU.

  • Visualization utilities that overlay bounding boxes and labels (text) on the input image based on inference results.

Reference Design Contents:#

  • Source code for the System Integrated Reference Design.

  • Sample applications that demonstrate ML inference accelerated on the AI Engines, hardware-accelerated pre-processing using the image_processing PL HLS(High Level Synthesis) kernel, and CPU-based post-processing.

  • Ready-to-test boot images that embed the application binary for immediate evaluation on target hardware.

Requirements#

To build the reference design and deploy it on board, the following setup are required:

Download Reference Design:#

Ensure the reference design has been extracted per the instructions in Software Setup.

  1. Integrated System Reference Design source code: vitis_ai_2ve_source_v6.2.tar

  2. Prebuilt boot images (RevA): vitis_ai_2ve_prebuilt_boot_images_v6.2_RevA.tar

  3. Prebuilt boot images (RevB): vitis_ai_2ve_prebuilt_boot_images_v6.2_RevB.tar

  4. SDK to cross-compile applications on the host machine: vitis_ai_2ve_sdk_v6.2.sh

The release package includes:

  • Boot images

  • ONNX model

  • VART-based and ONNX Runtime based applications

  • Source code for the VAIML Platform Reference Design

Deploying Pre-built Reference Design Image on the Board#

AMD provides the pre-built reference design image, along with a collection of C++ example applications, that you can run directly on the board to evaluate performance. These applications let you exercise the reference design without building anything from source.

For step-by-step instructions on running the C++ applications with the pre-built reference design image, see Reference Applications.

Building from Source#

To build the reference design from source yourself, see (Build the Reference Design).

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