Book Image

Caffe2 Quick Start Guide

By : Ashwin Nanjappa
Book Image

Caffe2 Quick Start Guide

By: Ashwin Nanjappa

Overview of this book

Caffe2 is a popular deep learning library used for fast and scalable training, and inference of deep learning models on different platforms. This book introduces you to the Caffe2 framework and demonstrates how you can leverage its power to build, train, and deploy efficient neural network models at scale. The Caffe 2 Quick Start Guide will help you in installing Caffe2, composing networks using its operators, training models, and deploying models to different architectures. The book will also guide you on how to import models from Caffe and other frameworks using the ONNX interchange format. You will then cover deep learning accelerators such as CPU and GPU and learn how to deploy Caffe2 models for inference on accelerators using inference engines. Finally, you'll understand how to deploy Caffe2 to a diverse set of hardware, using containers on the cloud and resource-constrained hardware such as Raspberry Pi. By the end of this book, you will not only be able to compose and train popular neural network models with Caffe2, but also deploy them on accelerators, to the cloud and on resource-constrained platforms such as mobile and embedded hardware.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Caffe model file formats

To be able to use Caffe models in Caffe2, we first need to understand the model file formats that Caffe can export to. Caffe exports a trained model into two files, as follows:

  1. The structure of the neural network is stored as a .prototxt file
  2. The weights of the layers of the neural network are stored as a .caffemodel file

Prototxt file

The prototxt is a text file that holds information about the structure of the neural network:

  • A list of layers in the neural network
  • The parameters of each layer, such as its name, type, input dimensions, and output dimensions
  • The connections between the layers

Caffe exports a neural network by serializing it using the Google Protocol Buffers (ProtoBuf) serialization...