Open Source Deep Learning Frameworks

ncnn is a high-performance neural network inference computing framework designed specifically for mobile platforms. It brings artificial intelligence right at your fingertips with no third-party dependencies, and speeds faster than all other known open source frameworks for mobile phone cpu. ncnn allows developers to easily deploy deep learning algorithm models to the mobile platform and create intelligent APPs. It is cross-platform and supports most commonly used CNN networks, including Classical CNN (VGG AlexNet GoogleNet Inception), Face Detection (MTCNN RetinaFace), Segmentation (FCN PSPNet UNet YOLACT), and more. ncnn is currently being used in a number of Tencent applications, namely: QQ, Qzone, WeChat, and Pitu.

Mobile AI Compute Engine (or MACE for short) is a deep learning inference framework optimized for mobile heterogeneous computing on Android, iOS, Linux and Windows devices. Runtime is optimized with NEON, OpenCL and Hexagon, and Winograd algorithm is introduced to speed up convolution operations. The initialization is also optimized to be faster. Chip-dependent power options like big.LITTLE scheduling, Adreno GPU hints are included as advanced APIs. UI responsiveness guarantee is sometimes obligatory when running a model. Mechanism like automatically breaking OpenCL kernel into small units is introduced to allow better preemption for the UI rendering task. Graph level memory allocation optimization and buffer reuse are supported. The core library tries to keep minimum external dependencies to keep the library footprint small.

TNN, a high-performance, lightweight neural network inference framework open sourced by Tencent Youtu Lab. It also has many outstanding advantages such as cross-platform, high performance, model compression, and code tailoring. The TNN framework further strengthens the support and performance optimization of mobile devices on the basis of the original Rapidnet and ncnn frameworks. At the same time, it refers to the high performance and good scalability characteristics of the industry's mainstream open source frameworks, and expands the support for X86 and NV GPUs. On the mobile phone, TNN has been used by many applications such as mobile QQ, weishi, and Pitu. As a basic acceleration framework for Tencent Cloud AI, TNN has provided acceleration support for the implementation of many businesses. Everyone is welcome to participate in the collaborative construction to promote the further improvement of the TNN inference framework.

Pipeless is an open-source computer vision framework to create and deploy applications without the complexity of building and maintaining multimedia pipelines. It ships everything you need to create and deploy efficient computer vision applications that work in real-time in just minutes. Pipeless is inspired by modern serverless technologies. It provides the development experience of serverless frameworks applied to computer vision. You provide some functions that are executed for new video frames and Pipeless takes care of everything else. You can easily use industry-standard models, such as YOLO, or load your custom model in one of the supported inference runtimes. Pipeless ships some of the most popular inference runtimes, such as the ONNX Runtime, allowing you to run inference with high performance on CPU or GPU out-of-the-box. You can deploy your Pipeless application with a single command to edge and IoT devices or the cloud.