Real Time Inference on Raspberry Pi 4 (30 fps!) ================================================= **Author**: `Tristan Rice `_ PyTorch has out of the box support for Raspberry Pi 4. This tutorial will guide you on how to setup a Raspberry Pi 4 for running PyTorch and run a MobileNet v2 classification model in real time (30 fps+) on the CPU. This was all tested with Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 4GB but should work with the 2GB variant as well as on the 3B with reduced performance. .. image:: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/909104/153093710-bc736b6f-69d9-4a50-a3e8-9f2b2c9e04fd.gif Prerequisites ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To follow this tutorial you'll need a Raspberry Pi 4, a camera for it and all the other standard accessories. * `Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 2GB+ `_ * `Raspberry Pi Camera Module `_ * Heat sinks and Fan (optional but recommended) * 5V 3A USB-C Power Supply * SD card (at least 8gb) * SD card read/writer Raspberry Pi 4 Setup ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ PyTorch only provides pip packages for Arm 64bit (aarch64) so you'll need to install a 64 bit version of the OS on your Raspberry Pi You can download the latest arm64 Raspberry Pi OS from https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_arm64/images/ and install it via rpi-imager. **32-bit Raspberry Pi OS will not work.** .. image:: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/909104/152866212-36ce29b1-aba6-4924-8ae6-0a283f1fca14.gif Installation will take at least a few minutes depending on your internet speed and sdcard speed. Once it's done it should look like: .. image:: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/909104/152867425-c005cff0-5f3f-47f1-922d-e0bbb541cd25.png Time to put your sdcard in your Raspberry Pi, connect the camera and boot it up. .. image:: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/909104/152869862-c239c980-b089-4bd5-84eb-0a1e5cf22df2.png Once that boots and you complete the initial setup you'll need to edit the ``/boot/config.txt`` file to enable the camera. .. code:: toml # This enables the extended features such as the camera. start_x=1 # This needs to be at least 128M for the camera processing, if it's bigger you can just leave it as is. gpu_mem=128 # You need to commment/remove the existing camera_auto_detect line since this causes issues with OpenCV/V4L2 capture. #camera_auto_detect=1 And then reboot. After you reboot the video4linux2 device ``/dev/video0`` should exist. Installing PyTorch and OpenCV ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ PyTorch and all the other libraries we need have ARM 64-bit/aarch64 variants so you can just install them via pip and have it work like any other Linux system. .. code:: shell $ pip install torch torchvision torchaudio $ pip install opencv-python $ pip install numpy --upgrade .. image:: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/909104/152874260-95a7a8bd-0f9b-438a-9c0b-5b67729e233f.png We can now check that everything installed correctly: .. code:: shell $ python -c "import torch; print(torch.__version__)" .. image:: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/909104/152874271-d7057c2d-80fd-4761-aed4-df6c8b7aa99f.png Video Capture ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ For video capture we're going to be using OpenCV to stream the video frames instead of the more common ``picamera``. `picamera` isn't available on 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS and it's much slower than OpenCV. OpenCV directly accesses the ``/dev/video0`` device to grab frames. The model we're using (MobileNetV2) takes in image sizes of ``224x224`` so we can request that directly from OpenCV at 36fps. We're targeting 30fps for the model but we request a slightly higher framerate than that so there's always enough frames. .. code:: python import cv2 from PIL import Image cap = cv2.VideoCapture(0) cap.set(cv2.CAP_PROP_FRAME_WIDTH, 224) cap.set(cv2.CAP_PROP_FRAME_HEIGHT, 224) cap.set(cv2.CAP_PROP_FPS, 36) OpenCV returns a ``numpy`` array in BGR so we need to read and do a bit of shuffling to get it into the expected RGB format. .. code:: python ret, image = cap.read() # convert opencv output from BGR to RGB image = image[:, :, [2, 1, 0]] This data reading and processing takes about ``3.5 ms``. Image Preprocessing ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ We need to take the frames and transform them into the format the model expects. This is the same processing as you would do on any machine with the standard torchvision transforms. .. code:: python from torchvision import transforms preprocess = transforms.Compose([ # convert the frame to a CHW torch tensor for training transforms.ToTensor(), # normalize the colors to the range that mobilenet_v2/3 expect transforms.Normalize(mean=[0.485, 0.456, 0.406], std=[0.229, 0.224, 0.225]), ]) input_tensor = preprocess(image) # The model can handle multiple images simultaneously so we need to add an # empty dimension for the batch. # [3, 224, 224] -> [1, 3, 224, 224] input_batch = input_tensor.unsqueeze(0) Model Choices ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ There's a number of models you can choose from to use with different performance characteristics. Not all models provide a ``qnnpack`` pretrained variant so for testing purposes you should chose one that does but if you train and quantize your own model you can use any of them. We're using ``mobilenet_v2`` for this tutorial since it has good performance and accuracy. Raspberry Pi 4 Benchmark Results: +--------------------+------+-----------------------+-----------------------+--------------------+ | Model | FPS | Total Time (ms/frame) | Model Time (ms/frame) | qnnpack Pretrained | +====================+======+=======================+=======================+====================+ | mobilenet_v2 | 33.7 | 29.7 | 26.4 | True | +--------------------+------+-----------------------+-----------------------+--------------------+ | mobilenet_v3_large | 29.3 | 34.1 | 30.7 | True | +--------------------+------+-----------------------+-----------------------+--------------------+ | resnet18 | 9.2 | 109.0 | 100.3 | False | +--------------------+------+-----------------------+-----------------------+--------------------+ | resnet50 | 4.3 | 233.9 | 225.2 | False | +--------------------+------+-----------------------+-----------------------+--------------------+ | resnext101_32x8d | 1.1 | 892.5 | 885.3 | False | +--------------------+------+-----------------------+-----------------------+--------------------+ | inception_v3 | 4.9 | 204.1 | 195.5 | False | +--------------------+------+-----------------------+-----------------------+--------------------+ | googlenet | 7.4 | 135.3 | 132.0 | False | +--------------------+------+-----------------------+-----------------------+--------------------+ | shufflenet_v2_x0_5 | 46.7 | 21.4 | 18.2 | False | +--------------------+------+-----------------------+-----------------------+--------------------+ | shufflenet_v2_x1_0 | 24.4 | 41.0 | 37.7 | False | +--------------------+------+-----------------------+-----------------------+--------------------+ | shufflenet_v2_x1_5 | 16.8 | 59.6 | 56.3 | False | +--------------------+------+-----------------------+-----------------------+--------------------+ | shufflenet_v2_x2_0 | 11.6 | 86.3 | 82.7 | False | +--------------------+------+-----------------------+-----------------------+--------------------+ MobileNetV2: Quantization and JIT ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ For optimal performance we want a model that's quantized and fused. Quantized means that it does the computation using int8 which is much more performant than the standard float32 math. Fused means that consecutive operations have been fused together into a more performant version where possible. Commonly things like activations (``ReLU``) can be merged into the layer before (``Conv2d``) during inference. The aarch64 version of pytorch requires using the ``qnnpack`` engine. .. code:: python import torch torch.backends.quantized.engine = 'qnnpack' For this example we'll use a prequantized and fused version of MobileNetV2 that's provided out of the box by torchvision. .. code:: python from torchvision import models net = models.quantization.mobilenet_v2(pretrained=True, quantize=True) We then want to jit the model to reduce Python overhead and fuse any ops. Jit gives us ~30fps instead of ~20fps without it. .. code:: python net = torch.jit.script(net) Putting It Together ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ We can now put all the pieces together and run it: .. code:: python import time import torch import numpy as np from torchvision import models, transforms import cv2 from PIL import Image torch.backends.quantized.engine = 'qnnpack' cap = cv2.VideoCapture(0, cv2.CAP_V4L2) cap.set(cv2.CAP_PROP_FRAME_WIDTH, 224) cap.set(cv2.CAP_PROP_FRAME_HEIGHT, 224) cap.set(cv2.CAP_PROP_FPS, 36) preprocess = transforms.Compose([ transforms.ToTensor(), transforms.Normalize(mean=[0.485, 0.456, 0.406], std=[0.229, 0.224, 0.225]), ]) net = models.quantization.mobilenet_v2(pretrained=True, quantize=True) # jit model to take it from ~20fps to ~30fps net = torch.jit.script(net) started = time.time() last_logged = time.time() frame_count = 0 with torch.no_grad(): while True: # read frame ret, image = cap.read() if not ret: raise RuntimeError("failed to read frame") # convert opencv output from BGR to RGB image = image[:, :, [2, 1, 0]] permuted = image # preprocess input_tensor = preprocess(image) # create a mini-batch as expected by the model input_batch = input_tensor.unsqueeze(0) # run model output = net(input_batch) # do something with output ... # log model performance frame_count += 1 now = time.time() if now - last_logged > 1: print(f"{frame_count / (now-last_logged)} fps") last_logged = now frame_count = 0 Running it shows that we're hovering at ~30 fps. .. image:: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/909104/152892609-7d115705-3ec9-4f8d-beed-a51711503a32.png This is with all the default settings in Raspberry Pi OS. If you disabled the UI and all the other background services that are enabled by default it's more performant and stable. If we check ``htop`` we see that we have almost 100% utilization. .. image:: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/909104/152892630-f094b84b-19ba-48f6-8632-1b954abc59c7.png To verify that it's working end to end we can compute the probabilities of the classes and `use the ImageNet class labels `_ to print the detections. .. code:: python top = list(enumerate(output[0].softmax(dim=0))) top.sort(key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True) for idx, val in top[:10]: print(f"{val.item()*100:.2f}% {classes[idx]}") ``mobilenet_v3_large`` running in real time: .. image:: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/909104/153093710-bc736b6f-69d9-4a50-a3e8-9f2b2c9e04fd.gif Detecting an orange: .. image:: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/909104/153092153-d9c08dfe-105b-408a-8e1e-295da8a78c19.jpg Detecting a mug: .. image:: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/909104/153092155-4b90002f-a0f3-4267-8d70-e713e7b4d5a0.jpg Troubleshooting: Performance ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ PyTorch by default will use all of the cores available. If you have anything running in the background on the Raspberry Pi it may cause contention with the model inference causing latency spikes. To alleviate this you can reduce the number of threads which will reduce the peak latency at a small performance penalty. .. code:: python torch.set_num_threads(2) For ``shufflenet_v2_x1_5`` using ``2 threads`` instead of ``4 threads`` increases best case latency to ``72 ms`` from ``60 ms`` but eliminates the latency spikes of ``128 ms``. Next Steps ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You can create your own model or fine tune an existing one. If you fine tune on one of the models from `torchvision.models.quantized `_ most of the work to fuse and quantize has already been done for you so you can directly deploy with good performance on a Raspberry Pi. See more: * `Quantization `_ for more information on how to quantize and fuse your model. * `Transfer Learning Tutorial `_ for how to use transfer learning to fine tune a pre-existing model to your dataset.