SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR HARDWARE-BASED POOLING

Described herein are systems and methods that utilize a novel hardware-based pooling architecture to process the output of a convolution engine representing an output channel of a convolution layer in a convolutional neural network (CNN). The pooling system converts the output into a set of arrays and aligns them according to a pooling operation to generate a pooling result. In certain embodiments, this is accomplished by using an aligner that aligns, e.g., over a number of arithmetic cycles, an array of data in the output into rows and shifts the rows relative to each other. A pooler applies a pooling operation to a combination of a subset of data from each row to generate the pooling result.