Hi everyone,
I have recently been playing around with the Tensorflow support built into the Vision Development Module. It seems to work fine and I have the basics up and running. There are a couple of problems though that I would like to solve.
Firstly, it seems to not use GPU acceleration at all which mostly makes it useless for real time processing at any sensible frame rate.
Secondly, it is locked into the VDM which is not cheap and also totally closed source. Under the hood the regular Tensorflow DLLs are called, but via a layer of the Vision toolkit.
Third, for this closed source reason we are locked into whey ever version of Tensorflow NI chooses. I totally get that from their business point of view, but conversely I suspect that there is very little push inside NI to update this regularly due to all the hurdles that come with it.
My proposal is to implement some kind of community edition of Tensorflow API that wraps the Tensorflow DLL directly in LabVIEW and exposes hardware acceleration capabilities.
Anybody interested in collaboration? I know a little bit about Tensorflow, but not enough to be productive, so my first step would just be to mimic the API provided by NI which is deliberately quite simple.