[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [Computer Vision / Perception] Building a Tensorflow Object Detection and Localization ROS Package

[Adam Allevato]

Hi Drew! Glad to hear someone is working on this, it's something that I've felt ROS has needed for a while (and some partial implementations are out there).

Most ROS pipelines that I've seen that depend on TensorFlow, CuDNN, etc. being installed simply provide full instructions for installing the dependencies in their repository. Unfortunately this makes it hard to install via apt-get, and it's more complicated than cloning a git repository into your catkin workspace, but as long as the installation information is kept up to date, it's not too bad to copy-paste commands into a terminal.

I've gotten tensorflow and caffe interfaced with ROS before, and I had to install everything manually. I found the tutorials on PyImageSearch to be quite helpful, maybe you could reference those or make your own version that's more appropriate for your dependencies.

Also, I believe that tensorflow can be installed via `pip install tensorflow` even if you don't have CUDA installed, it will just install the CPU version of TensorFlow. So you could ask users to install tensorflow via pip, and provide links on how to install the dependencies if your users want more speed.

Also, it would be great to get people to start standarizing vision pipelines so they are interoperable. May I suggest that you make your detector output messages from the vision_msgs package?





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