Security Barrier Camera C++ Demo

This demo showcases Vehicle and License Plate Detection network followed by the Vehicle Attributes Recognition and License Plate Recognition networks applied on top of the detection results. You can use a set of the following pre-trained models with the demo:

  • vehicle-license-plate-detection-barrier-0106 or vehicle-license-plate-detection-barrier-0123, which is primary detection network to find the vehicles and license plates
  • vehicle-attributes-recognition-barrier-0039 or vehicle-attributes-recognition-barrier-0042, which is executed on top of the results from the first network and reports general vehicle attributes, for example, vehicle type (car/van/bus/track) and color
  • license-plate-recognition-barrier-0001 or license-plate-recognition-barrier-0007, which is executed on top of the results from the first network and reports a string per recognized license plate

For more information about the pre-trained models, refer to the model documentation.

Other demo objectives are:

  • Video/Camera as inputs, via OpenCV*
  • Example of complex asynchronous networks pipelining: Vehicle Attributes and License Plate Recognition networks are executed on top of the Vehicle Detection results
  • Visualization of Vehicle Attributes and License Plate information for each detected object

How It Works

On the start-up, the application reads command line parameters and loads the specified networks. The Vehicle and License Plate Detection network is required, the other two are optional.

The core component of the application pipeline is the Worker class, which executes incoming instances of a Task class. Task is an abstract class that describes data to process and how to process the data. For example, a Task can be to read a frame or to get detection results. There is a pool of Task instances. These Tasks are awaiting to be executed. When a Task from the pool is being executed, it may create and/or submit another Task to the pool. Each Task stores a smart pointer to an instance of VideoFrame, which represents an image the Task works with. When the sequence of Tasks is completed and none of the Tasks require a VideoFrame instance, the VideoFrame is destroyed. This triggers creation of a new sequence of Tasks. The pipeline of this demo executes the following sequence of Tasks:

  • Reader, which reads a new frame
  • InferTask, which starts detection inference
  • RectExtractor, which waits for detection inference to complete and runs a classifier and a recognizer
  • ResAggregator, which draws the results of the inference on the frame
  • Drawer, which shows the frame with the inference results

At the end of the sequence, the VideoFrame is destroyed and the sequence starts again for the next frame.

NOTE: By default, Open Model Zoo demos expect input with BGR channels order. If you trained your model to work with RGB order, you need to manually rearrange the default channels order in the demo application or reconvert your model using the Model Optimizer tool with --reverse_input_channels argument specified. For more information about the argument, refer to When to Reverse Input Channels section of Converting a Model Using General Conversion Parameters

Running

Running the application with the -h option yields the following usage message:

[ INFO ] InferenceEngine: <version>
interactive_vehicle_detection [OPTION]
Options:
-h Print a usage message.
-i "<path1>" "<path2>" Required for video or image files input. Path to video or image files.
-m "<path>" Required. Path to the Vehicle and License Plate Detection model .xml file.
-m_va "<path>" Optional. Path to the Vehicle Attributes model .xml file.
-m_lpr "<path>" Optional. Path to the License Plate Recognition model .xml file.
-l "<absolute_path>" Required for CPU custom layers. Absolute path to a shared library with the kernels implementation.
Or
-c "<absolute_path>" Required for GPU custom kernels. Absolute path to an .xml file with the kernels description.
-d "<device>" Optional. Specify the target device for Vehicle Detection (the list of available devices is shown below). Default value is CPU. Use "-d HETERO:<comma-separated_devices_list>" format to specify HETERO plugin. The application looks for a suitable plugin for the specified device.
-d_va "<device>" Optional. Specify the target device for Vehicle Attributes (the list of available devices is shown below). Default value is CPU. Use "-d HETERO:<comma-separated_devices_list>" format to specify HETERO plugin. The application looks for a suitable plugin for the specified device.
-d_lpr "<device>" Optional. Specify the target device for License Plate Recognition (the list of available devices is shown below). Default value is CPU. Use "-d HETERO:<comma-separated_devices_list>" format to specify HETERO plugin. The application looks for a suitable plugin for the specified device.
-pc Optional. Enables per-layer performance statistics.
-r Optional. Output inference results as raw values.
-t Optional. Probability threshold for vehicle and license plate detections.
-no_show Optional. Do not show processed video.
-auto_resize Optional. Enable resizable input with support of ROI crop and auto resize.
-nireq Optional. Number of infer requests. 0 sets the number of infer requests equal to the number of inputs.
-nc Required for web camera input. Maximum number of processed camera inputs (web cameras).
-fpga_device_ids Optional. Specify FPGA device IDs (0,1,n).
-loop_video Optional. Enable playing video on a loop.
-n_iqs Optional. Number of allocated frames. It is a multiplier of the number of inputs.
-ni Optional. Specify the number of channels generated from provided inputs (with -i and -nc keys). For example, if only one camera is provided, but -ni is set to 2, the demo will process frames as if they are captured from two cameras. 0 sets the number of input channels equal to the number of provided inputs.
-fps Optional. Set the playback speed not faster than the specified FPS. 0 removes the upper bound.
-n_wt Optional. Set the number of threads including the main thread a Worker class will use.
-display_resolution Optional. Specify the maximum output window resolution.
-tag Required for HDDL plugin only. If not set, the performance on Intel(R) Movidius(TM) X VPUs will not be optimal. Running each network on a set of Intel(R) Movidius(TM) X VPUs with a specific tag. You must specify the number of VPUs for each network in the hddl_service.config file. Refer to the corresponding README file for more information.
-nstreams "<integer>" Optional. Number of streams to use for inference on the CPU or/and GPU in throughput mode (for HETERO and MULTI device cases use format <device1>:<nstreams1>,<device2>:<nstreams2> or just <nstreams>)
-nthreads "<integer>" Optional. Number of threads to use for inference on the CPU (including HETERO and MULTI cases).
-u Optional. List of monitors to show initially.

Running the application with an empty list of options yields an error message.

To run the demo, you can use public or pre-trained models. To download the pre-trained models, use the OpenVINO Model Downloader. The list of models supported by the demo is in the models.lst file in the demo's directory.

NOTE: Before running the demo with a trained model, make sure the model is converted to the Inference Engine format (*.xml + *.bin) using the Model Optimizer tool.

For example, to do inference on a GPU with the OpenVINO toolkit pre-trained models, run the following command:

./security_barrier_camera_demo -i <path_to_video>/inputVideo.mp4 -m <path_to_model>/vehicle-license-plate-detection-barrier-0106.xml -m_va <path_to_model>/vehicle-attributes-recognition-barrier-0039.xml -m_lpr <path_to_model>/license-plate-recognition-barrier-0001.xml -d GPU

To do inference for two video inputs using two asynchronous infer request on FPGA with the OpenVINO toolkit pre-trained models, run the following command:

./security_barrier_camera_demo -i <path_to_video>/inputVideo_0.mp4 <path_to_video>/inputVideo_1.mp4 -m <path_to_model>/vehicle-license-plate-detection-barrier-0106.xml -m_va <path_to_model>/vehicle-attributes-recognition-barrier-0039.xml -m_lpr <path_to_model>/license-plate-recognition-barrier-0001.xml -d HETERO:FPGA,CPU -d_va HETERO:FPGA,CPU -d_lpr HETERO:FPGA,CPU -nireq 2

To do inference for video inputs on Intel® Vision Accelerator Design with Intel® Movidius™ VPUs, some optimization hints are suggested to make good use of the computation ability:

  • configuring the number of allocated frames (-n_iqs) to provide enough inputs for inference;
  • configuring the number of infer request (-nireq) to achieve asynchronous inference;
  • configuring the number of threads (-n_wt) for multi-threaded processing.

For example, to run the sample on one Intel® Vision Accelerator Design with Intel® Movidius™ VPUs Compact R card, run the following command:

./security_barrier_camera_demo -i <path_to_video>/inputVideo.mp4 -m <path_to_model>/vehicle-license-plate-detection-barrier-0106.xml -m_va <path_to_model>/vehicle-attributes-recognition-barrier-0039.xml -m_lpr <path_to_model>/license-plate-recognition-barrier-0001.xml -d HDDL -d_va HDDL -d_lpr HDDL -n_iqs 10 -n_wt 4 -nireq 10

NOTE: For the -tag option (HDDL plugin only), you must specify the number of VPUs for each network in the hddl_service.config file located in the <INSTALL_DIR>/deployment_tools/inference_engine/external/hddl/config/ directory using the following tags:

  • tagDetect for the Vehicle and License Plate Detection network
  • tagAttr for the Vehicle Attributes Recognition network
  • tagLPR for the License Plate Recognition network

For example, to run the sample on one Intel® Vision Accelerator Design with Intel® Movidius™ VPUs Compact R card with eight Intel® Movidius™ X VPUs:

"service_settings":
{
"graph_tag_map":{"tagDetect": 6, "tagAttr": 1, "tagLPR": 1}
}

Optimization Hints for Heterogeneous Scenarios with FPGA

If you build the Inference Engine with the OMP, you can use the following parameters for Heterogeneous scenarios:

  • OMP_NUM_THREADS: Specifies number of threads to use. For heterogeneous scenarios with FPGA, when several inference requests are used asynchronously, limiting the number of CPU threads with OMP_NUM_THREADS allows to avoid competing for resources between threads. For the Security Barrier Camera Demo, recommended value is OMP_NUM_THREADS=1.
  • KMP_BLOCKTIME: Sets the time, in milliseconds, that a thread should wait, after completing the execution of a parallel region, before sleeping. The default value is 200ms, which is not optimal for the demo. Recommended value is KMP_BLOCKTIME=1.

Demo Output

The demo uses OpenCV to display the resulting frame with detections rendered as bounding boxes and text.

NOTE: On VPU devices (Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick, Intel® Neural Compute Stick 2, and Intel® Vision Accelerator Design with Intel® Movidius™ VPUs) this demo has been tested on the following Model Downloader available topologies: >* license-plate-recognition-barrier-0001 >* vehicle-attributes-recognition-barrier-0039 >* vehicle-license-plate-detection-barrier-0106 Other models may produce unexpected results on these devices.

See Also