Legacy Mode for Caffe* Custom Layers

NOTE: This functionality is deprecated and will be removed in future releases.

Model Optimizer can register custom layers in a way that the output shape is calculated by the Caffe* framework installed on your system. This chapter covers this option.

NOTE: Caffe Python* API has an issue when layer name does not correspond to the name of its top. The fix was implemented on BVLC Caffe*. The Caffe framework on your computer must contain this fix. Otherwise, Caffe framework can unexpectedly fail during the fallback procedure.

NOTE: The Caffe fallback feature was validated against this GitHub revision. You may have issues with forks or later Caffe framework versions.

  1. Create a file CustomLayersMapping.xml:
    mv extensions/front/caffe/CustomLayersMapping.xml.example extensions/front/caffe/CustomLayersMapping.xml
  2. Add (register) custom layers to CustomLayersMapping.xml:
    <CustomLayer NativeType="${Type}" hasParam="${has_params}" protoParamName="${layer_param}"/>

Where:

Example:

  1. Proposal layer has parameters, and they appear in the Intermediate Representation. The parameters are stored in the proposal_param property of the layer:
    <CustomLayer NativeType="Proposal" hasParam ="true" protoParamName = "proposal_param"/>
  2. CustomLayer layer has no parameters:
    <CustomLayer NativeType="CustomLayer" hasParam ="false"/>

For this feature, you need an appropriate version of Caffe installed on the computer on which you run the Model Optimizer.

Constraints of Using the Caffe Fallback

Several layers in the Caffe* framework can have shapes that dynamically depend on the input data, not only the layers that proceed the layer and its parameters. For example, SimplerNMS is filtering out bounding boxes that do not satisfy the condition. Internally, Caffe fallback forwards the whole net without any meaningful data - just some noise. It is natural to get only one bounding box (0,0,0,0) instead of expected number (for example, 15). There is an option to patch Caffe accordingly, however, it makes success of Intermediate Representation generation on the patched Caffe on the particular machine. To keep the solution independent from Caffe, we recommend to use extensions mechanism for such layers.

Known cases like Proposal, DetectionOutput, SimplerNMS are implemented as extensions and can be used out of the box.

A detailed description of supported layers is in the Intermediate Representation Layers Notation Reference Catalog.

Building Caffe*

  1. Build Caffe* with Python* 3.5:
    export CAFFE_HOME=PATH_TO_CAFFE
    cd $CAFFE_HOME
    rm -rf ./build
    mkdir ./build
    cd ./build
    cmake -DCPU_ONLY=ON -DOpenCV_DIR=<your opencv install dir> -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/python3.5 ..
    make all # also builds pycaffe
    make install
    make runtest # optional
  2. Add Caffe Python directory to PYTHONPATH to let it be imported from the Python program:
    export PYTHONPATH=$CAFFE_HOME/python;$PYTHONPATH
  3. Check the Caffe installation:
    python3
    import caffe

If Caffe was installed correctly, the caffe module is imported without errors.