• Introduction
• Build on Linux* Systems
  • Software Requirements
  • Build Steps
  • Additional Build Options
• Build for Raspbian* Stretch OS
  • Hardware Requirements
  • Native Compilation
  • Cross Compilation Using Docker*
  • Additional Build Options
• Build on Windows* Systems
  • Software Requirements
  • Build Steps
  • Additional Build Options
  • Building Inference Engine with Ninja* Build System
• Build on macOS* Systems
  • Software Requirements
  • Build Steps
  • Additional Build Options
• Use Custom OpenCV Builds for Inference Engine
• Adding Inference Engine to your project
• (Optional) Additional Installation Steps for the Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick and Neural Compute Stick 2
  • For Linux, Raspbian Stretch* OS
  • For Windows
• Next Steps
• Additional Resources

The Inference Engine can infer models in different formats with various input and output formats.

The open source version of Inference Engine includes the following plugins:

Inference Engine plugin for Intel® FPGA is distributed only in a binary form as a part of Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™.

The software was validated on:

• Ubuntu* 16.04 (64-bit) with default GCC* 5.4.0
• CentOS* 7.4 (64-bit) with default GCC* 4.8.5

• CMake* 3.5 or higher
• GCC* 4.8 or higher to build the Inference Engine
• Python 2.7 or higher for Inference Engine Python API wrapper
• (Optional) Install Intel® Graphics Compute Runtime for OpenCL™ Driver package 19.04.12237.

1. Clone submodules:

   cd dldt/inference-engine
   git submodule init
   git submodule update --recursive

2. Install build dependencies using the install_dependencies.sh script in the project root folder:

   chmod +x install_dependencies.sh

   ./install_dependencies.sh

3. By default, the build enables the Inference Engine GPU plugin to infer models on your Intel® Processor Graphics. This requires you to Install Intel® Graphics Compute Runtime for OpenCL™ Driver package 19.04.12237 before running the build. If you don't want to use the GPU plugin, use the -DENABLE_CLDNN=OFF CMake build option and skip the installation of the Intel® Graphics Compute Runtime for OpenCL™ Driver.
4. Create a build folder:

  mkdir build && cd build

5. Inference Engine uses a CMake-based build system. In the created build directory, run cmake to fetch project dependencies and create Unix makefiles, then run make to build the project:

  cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
  make --jobs=$(nproc --all)

You can use the following additional build options:

• Internal JIT GEMM implementation is used by default.

• To switch to OpenBLAS* implementation, use the GEMM=OPENBLAS option and BLAS_INCLUDE_DIRS and BLAS_LIBRARIES CMake options to specify path to the OpenBLAS headers and library. For example use the following options on CentOS*: -DGEMM=OPENBLAS -DBLAS_INCLUDE_DIRS=/usr/include/openblas -DBLAS_LIBRARIES=/usr/lib64/libopenblas.so.0.

• To switch to the optimized MKL-ML* GEMM implementation, use -DGEMM=MKL and -DMKLROOT=<path_to_MKL> CMake options to specify a path to unpacked MKL-ML with the include and lib folders. MKL-ML* package can be downloaded from the MKL-DNN repository.

• Threading Building Blocks (TBB) is used by default. To build the Inference Engine with OpenMP* threading, set the -DTHREADING=OMP option.

• Required versions of TBB and OpenCV packages are downloaded automatically by the CMake-based script. If you want to use the automatically downloaded packages but you already have installed TBB or OpenCV packages configured in your environment, you may need to clean the TBBROOT and OpenCV_DIR environment variables before running the cmake command, otherwise they won't be downloaded and the build may fail if incompatible versions were installed.

• If the CMake-based build script can not find and download the OpenCV package that is supported on your platform, or if you want to use a custom build of the OpenCV library, refer to the Use Custom OpenCV Builds section for details.

• To build the Python API wrapper:

  1. Install all additional packages listed in the /inference-engine/ie_bridges/python/requirements.txt file:

     pip install -r requirements.txt  

  2. use the -DENABLE_PYTHON=ON option. To specify an exact Python version, use the following options:

     -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=`which python3.7` \
     -DPYTHON_LIBRARY=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpython3.7m.so \
     -DPYTHON_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/include/python3.7

• To switch off/on the CPU and GPU plugins, use the cmake options -DENABLE_MKL_DNN=ON/OFF and -DENABLE_CLDNN=ON/OFF respectively.

NOTE: Only the MYRIAD plugin is supported.

• Raspberry Pi* 2 or 3 with Raspbian* Stretch OS (32-bit). Check that it's CPU supports ARMv7 instruction set (uname -m command returns armv7l).

  NOTE: Despite the Raspberry Pi* CPU is ARMv8, 32-bit OS detects ARMv7 CPU instruction set. The default gcc compiler applies ARMv6 architecture flag for compatibility with lower versions of boards. For more information, run the gcc -Q --help=target command and refer to the description of the -march= option.

You can compile the Inference Engine for Raspberry Pi* in one of the two ways:

• Native Compilation, which is the simplest way, but time-consuming
• Cross Compilation Using Docker*, which is the recommended way

Native compilation of the Inference Engine is the most straightforward solution. However, it might take at least one hour to complete on Raspberry Pi* 3.

1. Install dependencies:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y git cmake libusb-1.0-0-dev

2. Go to the inference-engine directory of the cloned dldt repository:

cd dldt/inference-engine

3. Initialize submodules:

git submodule init
git submodule update --recursive

4. Create a build folder:

mkdir build && cd build

5. Build the Inference Engine:

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
      -DENABLE_SSE42=OFF \
      -DTHREADING=SEQ \
      -DENABLE_GNA=OFF .. && make

This compilation was tested on the following configuration:

• Host: Ubuntu* 16.04 (64-bit, Intel® Core™ i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz × 8)
• Target: Raspbian* Stretch (32-bit, ARMv7, Raspberry Pi* 3)

1. Install Docker*:

sudo apt-get install -y docker.io

2. Add a current user to docker group:

sudo usermod -a -G docker $USER

Log out and log in for this to take effect.

3. Create a directory named ie_cross_armhf and add a text file named Dockerfile with the following content:

FROM debian:stretch

USER root

RUN dpkg --add-architecture armhf && \
    apt-get update && \
    apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
    build-essential \
    crossbuild-essential-armhf \
    git \
    wget \
    cmake \
    libusb-1.0-0-dev:armhf \
    libgtk-3-dev:armhf \
    libavcodec-dev:armhf \
    libavformat-dev:armhf \
    libswscale-dev:armhf \
    libgstreamer1.0-dev:armhf \
    libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev:armhf \
    libpython3-dev:armhf \
    python3-pip

It uses the Debian* Stretch (Debian 9) OS for compilation because it is a base of the Raspbian* Stretch.

4. Build a Docker* image:

docker image build -t ie_cross_armhf ie_cross_armhf

5. Run Docker* container with mounted source code folder from host:

docker run -it -v /absolute/path/to/dldt:/dldt ie_cross_armhf /bin/bash

6. While in the container:

   1. Go to the inference-engine directory of the cloned dldt repository:

   cd dldt/inference-engine

   2. Create a build folder:

   mkdir build && cd build

   3. Build the Inference Engine:

   cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
       -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE="../cmake/arm.toolchain.cmake" \
       -DTHREADS_PTHREAD_ARG="-pthread" \
       -DENABLE_SSE42=OFF \
       -DTHREADING=SEQ \
       -DENABLE_GNA=OFF .. && make --jobs=$(nproc --all)

7. Press "Ctrl"+"D" to exit from Docker*. You can find the resulting binaries in the dldt/inference-engine/bin/armv7l/ directory and the OpenCV* installation in the dldt/inference-engine/temp.

NOTE: Native applications that link to cross-compiled Inference Engine library require an extra compilation flag -march=armv7-a.

You can use the following additional build options:

• Required versions of OpenCV packages are downloaded automatically by the CMake-based script. If you want to use the automatically downloaded packages but you already have installed OpenCV packages configured in your environment, you may need to clean the OpenCV_DIR environment variable before running the cmake command, otherwise they won't be downloaded and the build may fail if incompatible versions were installed.

• If the CMake-based build script can not find and download the OpenCV package that is supported on your platform, or if you want to use a custom build of the OpenCV library, refer to the Use Custom OpenCV Builds section for details.

• To build Python API wrapper, install libpython3-dev:armhf and python3-pip packages using apt-get, then install numpy and cython python modules using pip3 command and add the following cmake options:

  -DENABLE_PYTHON=ON \
  -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/python3.5 \
  -DPYTHON_LIBRARY=/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libpython3.5m.so \
  -DPYTHON_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/include/python3.5

The software was validated on:

• Microsoft* Windows* 10 (64-bit) with Visual Studio 2017 and Intel® C++ Compiler 2018 Update 3

• CMake* 3.5 or higher
• OpenBLAS* and mingw64* runtime dependencies.
• Intel® C++ Compiler 18.0 to build the Inference Engine on Windows.
• (Optional) Intel® Graphics Driver for Windows* [25.20] driver package.
• Python 3.4 or higher for Inference Engine Python API wrapper

1. Clone submodules:

   git submodule init
   git submodule update --recursive

2. Download and install Intel® C++ Compiler 18.0
3. Install OpenBLAS:
   1. Download OpenBLAS*
   2. Unzip the downloaded package to a directory on your machine. In this document, this directory is referred to as <OPENBLAS_DIR>.
4. By default, the build enables the Inference Engine GPU plugin to infer models on your Intel® Processor Graphics. This requires you to download and install the Intel® Graphics Driver for Windows* [25.20] driver package before running the build. If you don't want to use the GPU plugin, use the -DENABLE_CLDNN=OFF CMake build option and skip the installation of the Intel® Graphics Driver.
5. Create build directory:

   mkdir build

6. In the build directory, run cmake to fetch project dependencies and generate a Visual Studio solution:

cd build
cmake -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" -T "Intel C++ Compiler 18.0" ^
    -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ^
    -DICCLIB="C:\Program Files (x86)\IntelSWTools\compilers_and_libraries_2018\windows\compiler\lib" ..

7. Build generated solution in Visual Studio 2017 or run cmake --build . --config Release to build from the command line.

8. Before running the samples, add paths to TBB and OpenCV binaries used for the build to the %PATH% environment variable. By default, TBB binaries are downloaded by the CMake-based script to the <dldt_repo>/inference-engine/temp/tbb/lib folder, OpenCV binaries - to the <dldt_repo>/inference-engine/temp/opencv_4.1.0/bin folder.

• Internal JIT GEMM implementation is used by default.

• To switch to OpenBLAS GEMM implementation, use the -DGEMM=OPENBLAS CMake option and specify path to OpenBLAS using the -DBLAS_INCLUDE_DIRS=<OPENBLAS_DIR>\include and -DBLAS_LIBRARIES=<OPENBLAS_DIR>\lib\libopenblas.dll.a options. Prebuilt OpenBLAS* package can be downloaded here. mingw64* runtime dependencies can be downloaded here.

• To switch to the optimized MKL-ML* GEMM implementation, use the -DGEMM=MKL and -DMKLROOT=<path_to_MKL> CMake options to specify a path to unpacked MKL-ML with the include and lib folders. MKL-ML* package can be downloaded from the MKL-DNN repository.

• Threading Building Blocks (TBB) is used by default. To build the Inference Engine with OpenMP* threading, set the -DTHREADING=OMP option.

• Required versions of TBB and OpenCV packages are downloaded automatically by the CMake-based script. If you want to use the automatically downloaded packages but you already have installed TBB or OpenCV packages configured in your environment, you may need to clean the TBBROOT and OpenCV_DIR environment variables before running the cmake command, otherwise they won't be downloaded and the build may fail if incompatible versions were installed.

• If the CMake-based build script can not find and download the OpenCV package that is supported on your platform, or if you want to use a custom build of the OpenCV library, refer to the Use Custom OpenCV Builds section for details.

• To switch off/on the CPU and GPU plugins, use the cmake options -DENABLE_MKL_DNN=ON/OFF and -DENABLE_CLDNN=ON/OFF respectively.

• To build the Python API wrapper, use the -DENABLE_PYTHON=ON option. To specify an exact Python version, use the following options:

  -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE="C:\Program Files\Python37\python.exe" ^
  -DPYTHON_LIBRARY="C:\Program Files\Python37\libs\python37.lib" ^
  -DPYTHON_INCLUDE_DIR="C:\Program Files\Python37\include"

call "C:\Program Files (x86)\IntelSWTools\compilers_and_libraries_2018\windows\bin\ipsxe-comp-vars.bat" intel64 vs2017
set CXX=icl
set CC=icl
:: clean TBBROOT value set by ipsxe-comp-vars.bat, required TBB package will be downloaded by dldt cmake script
set TBBROOT=
cmake -G Ninja -Wno-dev -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
cmake --build . --config Release

NOTE: The current version of the OpenVINO™ toolkit for macOS* supports inference on Intel CPUs only.

The software was validated on:

• macOS* 10.14, 64-bit

• CMake* 3.5 or higher
• Clang* compiler from Xcode* 10.1
• Python* 3.4 or higher for the Inference Engine Python API wrapper

1. Clone submodules:

   cd dldt/inference-engine
   git submodule init
   git submodule update --recursive

2. Install build dependencies using the install_dependencies.sh script in the project root folder:

   chmod +x install_dependencies.sh

   ./install_dependencies.sh

3. Create a build folder:

  mkdir build

4. Inference Engine uses a CMake-based build system. In the created build directory, run cmake to fetch project dependencies and create Unix makefiles, then run make to build the project:

  cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
  make --jobs=$(nproc --all)

You can use the following additional build options:

• Internal JIT GEMM implementation is used by default.

• To switch to the optimized MKL-ML* GEMM implementation, use -DGEMM=MKL and -DMKLROOT=<path_to_MKL> cmake options to specify a path to unpacked MKL-ML with the include and lib folders. MKL-ML* package can be downloaded here

• Threading Building Blocks (TBB) is used by default. To build the Inference Engine with OpenMP* threading, set the -DTHREADING=OMP option.

• Required versions of TBB and OpenCV packages are downloaded automatically by the CMake-based script. If you want to use the automatically downloaded packages but you already have installed TBB or OpenCV packages configured in your environment, you may need to clean the TBBROOT and OpenCV_DIR environment variables before running the cmake command, otherwise they won't be downloaded and the build may fail if incompatible versions were installed.

• If the CMake-based build script can not find and download the OpenCV package that is supported on your platform, or if you want to use a custom build of the OpenCV library, refer to the Use Custom OpenCV Builds section for details.

• To build the Python API wrapper, use the -DENABLE_PYTHON=ON option. To specify an exact Python version, use the following options:

  -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/bin/python3.7 \
  -DPYTHON_LIBRARY=/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/lib/libpython3.7m.dylib \
  -DPYTHON_INCLUDE_DIR=/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/include/python3.7m

NOTE: The recommended and tested version of OpenCV is 4.1. The minimum supported version is 3.4.0.

Required versions of OpenCV packages are downloaded automatically during the building Inference Engine library. If the build script can not find and download the OpenCV package that is supported on your platform, you can use one of the following options:

• Download the most suitable version from the list of available pre-build packages from https://download.01.org/opencv/2019/openvinotoolkit from the <release_version>/inference_engine directory.

• Use a system provided OpenCV package (e.g with running the apt install libopencv-dev command). The following modules must be enabled: imgcodecs, videoio, highgui.

• Get the OpenCV package using a package manager: pip, conda, conan etc. The package must have the development components included (header files and CMake scripts).

• Build OpenCV from source using the build instructions on the OpenCV site.

After you got the built OpenCV library, perform the following preparation steps before running the Inference Engine build:

1. Set the OpenCV_DIR environment variable to the directory where the OpenCVConfig.cmake file of you custom OpenCV build is located.
2. Disable the package automatic downloading with using the -DENABLE_OPENCV=OFF option for CMake-based build script for Inference Engine.

For CMake projects, set the InferenceEngine_DIR environment variable:

export InferenceEngine_DIR=/path/to/dldt/inference-engine/build/

Then you can find Inference Engine by find_package:

find_package(InferenceEngine)
include_directories(${InferenceEngine_INCLUDE_DIRS})
target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} ${InferenceEngine_LIBRARIES} dl)

NOTE: These steps are only required if you want to perform inference on Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick or the Intel® Neural Compute Stick 2 using the Inference Engine MYRIAD Plugin. See also Intel® Neural Compute Stick 2 Get Started

1. Add the current Linux user to the users group:

sudo usermod -a -G users "$(whoami)"

Log out and log in for it to take effect.

2. To perform inference on Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick and Intel® Neural Compute Stick 2, install the USB rules as follows:

cat <<EOF > 97-myriad-usbboot.rules
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idProduct}=="2150", ATTRS{idVendor}=="03e7", GROUP="users", MODE="0666", ENV{ID_MM_DEVICE_IGNORE}="1"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idProduct}=="2485", ATTRS{idVendor}=="03e7", GROUP="users", MODE="0666", ENV{ID_MM_DEVICE_IGNORE}="1"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idProduct}=="f63b", ATTRS{idVendor}=="03e7", GROUP="users", MODE="0666", ENV{ID_MM_DEVICE_IGNORE}="1"
EOF

sudo cp 97-myriad-usbboot.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

sudo udevadm trigger

sudo ldconfig

rm 97-myriad-usbboot.rules

For Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick and Intel® Neural Compute Stick 2, install the Movidius™ VSC driver:

1. Go to the <DLDT_ROOT_DIR>/inference-engine/thirdparty/movidius/MovidiusDriver directory, where the DLDT_ROOT_DIR is the directory to which the DLDT repository was cloned.
2. Right click on the Movidius_VSC_Device.inf file and choose Install from the pop up menu.

You have installed the driver for your Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick or Intel® Neural Compute Stick 2.

Congratulations, you have built the Inference Engine. To get started with the OpenVINO™ DLDT, proceed to the Get Started guides:

• Get Started with Deep Learning Deployment Toolkit on Linux*

• OpenVINO™ Release Notes
• Introduction to Intel® Deep Learning Deployment Toolkit
• Inference Engine Samples Overview
• Inference Engine Developer Guide
• Model Optimizer Developer Guide

* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.