Hi!
There is a branch experimental/pyarmnn, created by Matthew Bentham, which contains python wrappers for armnn, which initially seems to work pretty well - building a whl archive works, which can be installed using pip and I was able to write an example, which runs inference on a float/quantized model and using all the supported frameworks - tf, tf-lite, caffe, onnx as well. What is missing is to get the python wrappers integrated, run and check unit tests and write a few examples. We discussed this with Matthew already, but I would be glad to hear more opinions regarding how we proceed and to kick off a discussion.
1. How to integrate pyarmnn?
There are 2 paths initially:
1. Build pyarmnn together with armnn using a single cmake command * By default it would be turned off, otherwise it would be build using e.g. -DBUILD_PYARMNN * The product is either a whl or a src package - so should there be 2 options e.g. -DBUILD_PYARMNN_SRC, -DBUILD_PYARMNN_WHL or only a single one, which would always build both? 2. Separate pyarmnn from armnn into a different repository (and keep it as a separate project) * Additionally to a) options -DARMNN_LIB and -DARMNN_INCLUDE would be required as well, so that it can be "linked" against configurable armnn build
The difference is mainly in maintainability - a) forces to maintain pyarmnn and update the swig files to generate wrappers per every release b) on the other hand keeps the project separate, allows to build pyarmnn with a configurable armnn release and doesn't create a dependency to update the swig files whenever armnn interface changes a little.
1. Remove tox? Yes/No - Tox is a python automation library, which is used to generate the wrappers or to run unit tests. It is not really needed, because the wrappers can be generated directly using swig and the src/whl packages generated using python/setuptools and it just creates another dependency. Unit tests can also be run directly using python. 2. Get pyarmnn published on pypi.org? Yes/No - we would be able to install pyarmnn using "pip install pyarmnn"
Any additional ideas, comments, feedback etc. would be of course appreciated.
Thanks! Pavel M