Glossary

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Abbreviation	Description
API	Application Programming Interface
AVX	Advanced Vector Extensions
clDNN	Compute Library for Deep Neural Networks
CLI	Command Line Interface
CNN	Convolutional Neural Network
CPU	Central Processing Unit
CV	Computer Vision
DL	Deep Learning
DLL	Dynamic Link Library
DNN	Deep Neural Networks
ELU	Exponential Linear rectification Unit
FCN	Fully Convolutional Network
FP	Floating Point
GCC	GNU Compiler Collection
GPU	Graphics Processing Unit
HD	High Definition
IR	Intermediate Representation
JIT	Just In Time
JTAG	Joint Test Action Group
LPR	License-Plate Recognition
LRN	Local Response Normalization
mAP	Mean Average Precision
Intel® OneDNN	Intel® OneAPI Deep Neural Network Library
mo	Command-line tool for model conversion, CLI for tools.mo.convert_model (legacy)
MVN	Mean Variance Normalization
NCDHW	Number of images, Channels, Depth, Height, Width
NCHW	Number of images, Channels, Height, Width
NHWC	Number of images, Height, Width, Channels
NMS	Non-Maximum Suppression
NN	Neural Network
NST	Neural Style Transfer
OD	Object Detection
OS	Operating System
ovc	OpenVINO Model Converter, command line tool for model conversion
PCI	Peripheral Component Interconnect
PReLU	Parametric Rectified Linear Unit
PSROI	Position Sensitive Region Of Interest
RCNN, R-CNN	Region-based Convolutional Neural Network
ReLU	Rectified Linear Unit
ROI	Region Of Interest
SDK	Software Development Kit
SSD	Single Shot multibox Detector
SSE	Streaming SIMD Extensions
USB	Universal Serial Bus
VGG	Visual Geometry Group
VOC	Visual Object Classes
WINAPI	Windows Application Programming Interface

Terms

Glossary of terms used in OpenVINO™

Batch

Number of images to analyze during one call of infer. Maximum batch size is a property of the model set before its compilation. In NHWC, NCHW, and NCDHW image data layout representations, the ‘N’ refers to the number of images in the batch.

Device Affinity

A preferred hardware device to run inference (CPU, GPU, NPU, etc.).

Extensibility mechanism, Custom layers

The mechanism that provides you with capabilities to extend the OpenVINO™ Runtime and model conversion API so that they can work with models containing operations that are not yet supported.

layer / operation

In OpenVINO, both terms are treated synonymously. To avoid confusion, “layer” is being pushed out and “operation” is the currently accepted term.

Model conversion API

The Conversion API is used to import and convert models trained in popular frameworks to a format usable by other OpenVINO components. Model conversion API is represented by a Python openvino.convert_model() method and ovc command-line tool.

OpenVINO™ Core

OpenVINO™ Core is a software component that manages inference on certain Intel(R) hardware devices: CPU, GPU, NPU, etc.

OpenVINO™ API

The basic default API for all supported devices, which allows you to load a model from Intermediate Representation or convert from ONNX, PaddlePaddle, TensorFlow, TensorFlow Lite file formats, set input and output formats and execute the model on various devices.

OpenVINO™ Runtime

A C++ library with a set of classes that you can use in your application to infer input tensors and get the results.

ov::Model

A class of the Model that OpenVINO™ Runtime reads from IR or converts from ONNX, PaddlePaddle, TensorFlow, TensorFlow Lite formats. Consists of model structure, weights and biases.

ov::CompiledModel

An instance of the compiled model which allows the OpenVINO™ Runtime to request (several) infer requests and perform inference synchronously or asynchronously.

ov::InferRequest

A class that represents the end point of inference on the model compiled by the device and represented by a compiled model. Inputs are set here, outputs should be requested from this interface as well.

ov::ProfilingInfo

Represents basic inference profiling information per operation.

ov::Layout

Image data layout refers to the representation of images batch. Layout shows a sequence of 4D or 5D tensor data in memory. A typical NCHW format represents pixel in horizontal direction, rows by vertical dimension, planes by channel and images into batch. See also [Layout API Overview](./OV_Runtime_UG/layout_overview.md).

ov::element::Type

Represents data element type. For example, f32 is 32-bit floating point, f16 is 16-bit floating point.

plugin / Inference Device / Inference Mode

OpenVINO makes hardware available for inference based on several core components. They used to be called “plugins” in earlier versions of documentation and you may still find this term in some articles. Because of their role in the software, they are now referred to as Devices and Modes (“virtual” devices). For a detailed description of the concept, refer to Inference Devices and Modes.

Tensor

A memory container used for storing inputs and outputs of the model, as well as weights and biases of the operations.

See Also

• Available Operations Sets