An Experimental Analysis of the Power Consumption of Convolutional Neural Networks for Keyword Spotting

Nearly all previous work on small-footprint keyword spotting with neural networks quantify model footprint in terms of the number of parameters and multiply operations for an inference pass. These values are, however, proxy measures since empirical performance in actual deployments is determined by many factors. In this paper, we study the power consumption of a family of convolutional neural networks for keyword spotting on a Raspberry Pi. We find that both proxies are good predictors of energy usage, although the number of multiplies is more predictive than the number of parameters. We also confirm that models with the highest accuracies are, unsurprisingly, the most power hungry.