DenseNet121-ONNX

DenseNet121 (ONNX) – Renesas X5H

Introduction

This repository hosts DenseNet-121, targeting the Renesas R-Car X5H platform for image classification inference on the NPX6 NPU.

• Model Architecture: DenseNet-121 — a densely-connected convolutional network where each layer receives feature maps from all preceding layers.
• Source Model: onnxmodelzoo/densenet-12 — ONNX Model Zoo densenet-12
• Task: Image Classification (ImageNet ILSVRC2012, 1000 classes)
• Parameters: 8.0M

Deployment Flow

The FP32 ONNX model is auto-cast to INT8 by the Renesas MWMX toolchain at compile time — no separate quantization step is required.

densenet_12_..._optimized.onnx (FP32)
        │
        └─▶  MWMX Runtime  ──▶  INT8 auto-cast  ──▶  NPX6 NPU

Provided Artifacts

Performance

Measured on Renesas R-Car X5H via the MWMX runtime (APM50 ship-performance CI pipeline).

Benchmark configuration: Single NPU · Batch size: 1 · Input resolution: not available from source data (TBD)

Note: the 12-core configuration is slightly slower than the 1-core configuration here — dense connectivity creates many sequential, small-tensor operations, so parallelism overhead can outweigh the benefit. Numbers are reported as measured, without adjustment.

Accuracy

TBD — not yet measured/published for this repo.

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Runtime Details

MWMX Runtime

• Engine: Renesas MWMX (Middleware MX) native inference runtime
• Input format: FP32 ONNX (compiled by the MWMX toolchain)
• NPU execution precision: INT8 (auto-cast by MWMX toolchain)
• Execution target: NPX6-48K NPU on R-Car X5H

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Prerequisites

To run inference on Renesas R-Car X5H, you need:

1. Renesas R-Car X5H board with NPX6 NPU
2. Renesas MWMX Runtime
3. Hugging Face CLI to download the model

Download

hf download Renesas/DenseNet121-ONNX --repo-type=model --include "fp32/*"

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Benchmark Methodology

• HIL runs: Hardware-in-the-loop — measured on physical R-Car X5H silicon via the MWMX runtime (metawaremx_runtime CI pipeline, "APM50" ship-performance target)
• Precision: FP32 ONNX input; INT8 execution (auto-cast by MWMX)
• Slices: results reported for both 1 AI core and 12 AI cores per NPU instance