Let's say you are a farmer and found about these great object detection or segmentation models that you can potentially use to do some automated analysis of crops. Moreover, let's say you know a little about computers but you are not an expert nor you know anything about AI or deep learning models. How do you build these models for your use case?

Assuming you will not be writing your own model, you will probably use a popular repository like TensorFlow Object Detection API to train these models. This will require you to set up this repository and run some commands in a terminal. Even a computer expert might take from a few hours to a day to install all the dependencies and setup this repository on a local machine. We didn't even include anything about annotation though. Since your objects are unique, you will probably not find an existing annotated dataset. You will need to use any annotation tool to annotate or have someone annotate these images for you. This whole process can take hours or even a few days to complete.

In this post, we will see how you can use Onepanel to train your models on custom objects starting from annotation to running inference using this newly trained model and visualizing its results. This can be easily done within 10 minutes on Onepanel excluding the actual training time and annotation time.

Getting data ready

The first thing we need to do is annotate some images to train our model on. For this blog, we are going to be training an object detection model that can detect macbooks in an image. For this, weI have downloaded some 70 or so images. Of which, we will use 60 to train the model and 10 to run the inference on. Of course, you cannot get a highly accurate model by just training on 50 or so images. Ideally, you want to use a lot of images and also play with hyper-parameters to come up with the best model. But for this demo, we will stick to 60 and hopefully our model will still be a good one.

Let's first create two tasks- train and test. We will upload 60 images to train task and remaining 10 or so to test task. You can upload these images to your cloud provider (i.e S3) and use it directly from CVAT or upload from a local machine.

Now, let's annotate macbooks in those 60 images. It took me less than 10 minutes to annotate these 60 images.

Training an object detection model from CVAT

Now that we have our data ready, we can go ahead and starting training our model.

1. Click on Actions for train task, and select Execute training Workflow.
2. Select TF Object Detection Training as a Workflow template.

Running inference using this newly trained model

Now, we can use this model to run inference on 10 images that we set aside. Since we had only 60 images, ideally we should not expect a highly accurate model. Anyway, let's upload the model to CVAT and run inference using it.

1. Click on Models to go to Model Manager.
2. Click on Create new model to upload the model.
3. Click on Connected file storage and select frozen_inference_graph.pb and classes.csv from root -> output -> train (task name) -> tf-object-detection-training -> frcnn-res101-coco (model that was trained) -> tf-object-detection-training-zx74h (Workflow that was executed).

        4. Hit Submit.

        5. Click on Models again or refresh the page to see newly uploaded model in the list.
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Now we can run inference on test task as follows:

1. Click on Actions under test task and select Automatic annotation.
2. Select the uploaded model (macbook-detector).
3. It will automatically map labels from test task to model's classes if they are similar (i.e macbook -> macbook).
4. Click on **Submit** and the inference process will be started.

Conclusion

In this post, we saw how you can leverage Onepanel to train object detection model from scratch and run inference using it with a few clicks. You can do the same for semantic segmentation using maskrcnn-training template. The good news is Onepanel is free to use and open-source. If you like Onepanel please give us a star on Github.

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