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

Susmita Ghanta; Karan Nathwani; Rohit Chaurasiya

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arXiv · 2603.01069

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

Susmita Ghanta·Karan Nathwani·Rohit Chaurasiya

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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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Susmita Ghanta, Karan Nathwani, Rohit Chaurasiya. 2026-03-01. SHIELD8-UAV: Sequential 8-bit Hardware Implementation of a Precision-Aware 1D-F-CNN for Low-Energy UAV Acoustic Detection and Temporal Tracking. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01069

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