Google Releases Tensorflow Lite Developer Preview for Android & iOS

Google mentioned TensorFlow Lite at Google I/O 2017 last may, an implementation of TensorFlow open source machine learning library specifically optimized for embedded use cases. The company said support was coming to Android Oreo, but it was not possible to evaluate the solution at the time.

The company has now released a developer preview of TensorFlow Lite for mobile and embedded devices with a lightweight cross-platform runtine that runs on Android and iOS for now.

TensorFlow Lite supports the Android Neural Networks API to take advantage of Machine Learning accelerators when available, but falls back to  CPU execution otherwise.

The architecture diagram above shows three components for TensorFlow Lite:

• TensorFlow Model – A trained TensorFlow model saved on disk.
• TensorFlow Lite Converter – A program that converts the model to the TensorFlow Lite file format.
• TensorFlow Lite Model File – A model file format based on FlatBuffers, that has been optimized for maximum speed and minimum size.

The model file is then within a Mobile App using a C++ or Java (Android only) API, and an interpreter optionally using the Neural Networks API.

TensorFlow Lite currently supports three models: MobileNet (A class of vision models to identify across 1000 different object classes),Inception v3 (An image recognition model with higher accuracy, larger size), and Smart Reply (An on-device conversational model for one-touch replies to chat messages).

The preview release is available on Github, where you’ll also find a demo app that can be tried with a pre-build binary, but it’s probably more fun/useful to instead build it from source in Android Studio and try to change the code to experiment and learn. You can also build the complete framework and demo app from source by cloning the repo. TensorFlow Lite may also be coming to Linux soon, as one of the comment in the announcement mentions that “it should be pretty easy to build TensorFlow Lite on Raspberry PI. We plan to make sure this path works seamlessly soon“. While most of the documentation can be found on Github, some more info may be available on TensorFlow Lite page.

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