Changes

As stated previously, the main application derives from the IIT Social-Distancing project. It was developed in several steps starting when only a few alpha samples of the i.MX8M Plus were available thanks to the fact that DAVE Embedded Systems joined the the component's beta program.

The first step was conducted using the official evaluation kit (EVK) by NXP. The goal was to make the Social-Distancing project to work on this platform maintaining the core functionalities. In essence, the code was modified to replace the [https://github.com/CMU-Perceptual-Computing-Lab/openpose OpenPose library] with [https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs-models/tree/master/posenet PoseNet]. This was required to cope with the operations actually supported by the [https://www.nxp.com/design/software/development-software/eiq-ml-development-environment:EIQ NXP eIQ] software stack and the NPU. For those who are familiar with embedded software development, this should be unsurprising. When porting applications from PC-like platforms to embedded platforms, in fact, handling such hardware/software constraints is a common practice.

It is worth remembering that, even though OpenPose was replaced, the software interface between high-level layers and PoseNet was not altered allowing to keep untouched these layers.

Step #2 concerned implementing some optimizations in order to increase the overall frame rate.

[[File:Ss-main-pipeline-v2-20210204.png|center|thumb|600x600px|Processing pipeline after implementing parallel computations]]

In this step, the application was migrated to the definitive hardware platform, the aforementioned ORCA SBC, which was designed while the software team was working on the EVK.