openvino 2021.4.1

Inference Engine Python* API

Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ Toolkit Runtime Package

Copyright © 2018-2021 Intel Corporation

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Introduction

OpenVINO™ toolkit is a comprehensive toolkit for quickly developing applications and solutions that solve a variety of tasks including emulation of human vision, automatic speech recognition, natural language processing, recommendation systems, and many others. Based on latest generations of artificial neural networks, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), recurrent and attention-based networks, the toolkit extends computer vision and non-vision workloads across Intel® hardware, maximizing performance. It accelerates applications with high-performance, AI and deep learning inference deployed from edge to cloud.

The Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit*:

• Enables CNN-based deep learning inference on the edge
• Supports heterogeneous execution across Intel® CPU, Intel® Integrated Graphics, Intel® Neural Compute Stick 2, and Intel® Vision Accelerator Design with Intel® Movidius™ VPUs
• Speeds time-to-market via an easy-to-use library of computer vision functions and pre-optimized kernels

The runtime package includes the following components installed by default:

Component	Description
Inference Engine	This is the engine that runs the deep learning model. It includes a set of libraries for an easy inference integration into your applications.

System Requirements

The complete list of supported hardware is available in the Release Notes.

The table below lists supported operating systems and Python* versions required to run the installation.

Supported Operating System	Python* Version (64-bit)
Ubuntu* 18.04 long-term support (LTS), 64-bit	3.6, 3.7, 3.8
Ubuntu* 20.04 long-term support (LTS), 64-bit	3.6, 3.7, 3.8
Red Hat* Enterprise Linux* 8, 64-bit	3.6, 3.8
CentOS* 7, 64-bit	3.6, 3.7, 3.8
macOS* 10.15.x versions	3.6, 3.7, 3.8
Windows 10*, 64-bit	3.6, 3.7, 3.8

NOTE: This package can be installed on other versions of Linux and Windows OSes, but only the specific versions above are fully validated.

Install the Runtime Package

Step 1. Set Up Python Virtual Environment

To avoid dependency conflicts, use a virtual environment. Skip this step only if you do want to install all dependencies globally.

Create virtual environment:

python -m pip install --user virtualenv 
python -m venv openvino_env

NOTE: On Linux and macOS, you may need to type python3 instead of python. You may also need to install pip.

Step 2. Activate Virtual Environment

On Linux and macOS:

source openvino_env/bin/activate

On Windows:

openvino_env\Scripts\activate

Step 3. Set Up and Update PIP to the Highest Version

Run the command below:

python -m pip install --upgrade pip

Step 4. Install the Package

Run the command below:

pip install openvino

Step 5. Verify that the Package Is Installed

Run the command below:

python -c "from openvino.inference_engine import IECore"

If installation was successful, you will not see any error messages (no console output).

Troubleshooting

Error: Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 is required. Get it with "Build Tools for Visual Studio"

On Windows* some dependencies may require compilation from source when installing. To resolve this issue, you need to install Build Tools for Visual Studio* 2019 and repeat package installation.

ImportError: libpython3.7m.so.1.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

To resolve missing external dependency on Ubuntu*, execute the following command:

sudo apt-get install libpython3.7

Additional Resources

• Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit
• OpenVINO™ toolkit online documentation
• OpenVINO™ Notebooks