Caffe: Convolutional Architecture for Fast Feature Extraction

Created by Yangqing Jia, UC Berkeley EECS department. In active development by the Berkeley Vision and Learning Center (BVLC).

Introduction

Caffe aims to provide computer vision scientists with a clean, modifiable implementation of state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms. Network structure is easily specified in separate config files, with no mess of hard-coded parameters in the code. Python and Matlab wrappers are provided.

At the same time, Caffe fits industry needs, with blazing fast C++/Cuda code for GPU computation. Caffe is currently the fastest GPU CNN implementation publicly available, and is able to process more than 40 million images per day on a single NVIDIA K40 GPU (or 20 million per day on a K20)*.

Caffe also provides seamless switching between CPU and GPU, which allows one to train models with fast GPUs and then deploy them on non-GPU clusters with one line of code: Caffe::set_mode(Caffe::CPU).

Even in CPU mode, computing predictions on an image takes only 20 ms when images are processed in batch mode.

• Caffe introductory presentation
• Installation instructions

* When measured with the SuperVision model that won the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2012.

License

Caffe is BSD 2-Clause licensed (refer to the LICENSE for details).

The pretrained models published by the BVLC, such as the Caffe reference ImageNet model are licensed for academic research / non-commercial use only. However, Caffe is a full toolkit for model training, so start brewing your own Caffe model today!

Citing Caffe

Please kindly cite Caffe in your publications if it helps your research:

@misc{Jia13caffe,
  Author = {Yangqing Jia},
  Title = { {Caffe}: An Open Source Convolutional Architecture for Fast Feature Embedding},
  Year  = {2013},
  Howpublished = {\url{http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/}}
}

Documentation

Tutorials and general documentation are written in Markdown format in the docs/ folder. While the format is quite easy to read directly, you may prefer to view the whole thing as a website. To do so, simply run jekyll serve -s docs and view the documentation website at http://0.0.0.0:4000 (to get jekyll, you must have ruby and do gem install jekyll).

We strive to provide provide lots of usage examples, and to document all code in docstrings. We'd appreciate your contribution to this effort!

Development

Caffe is developed with active participation of the community by the Berkeley Vision and Learning Center. We welcome all contributions!

The release cycle

• The dev branch is for new development, including community contributions. We aim to keep it in a functional state, but large changes may occur and things may get broken every now and then. Use this if you want the "bleeding edge".
• The master branch is handled by BVLC, which will integrate changes from dev on a roughly monthly schedule, giving it a release tag. Use this if you want more stability.

Setting priorities

• Make GitHub Issues for bugs, features you'd like to see, questions, etc.
• Development work is guided by milestones, which are sets of issues selected for concurrent release (integration from dev to master).
• Please note that since the core developers are largely researchers, we may work on a feature in isolation from the open-source community for some time before releasing it, so as to claim honest academic contribution. We do release it as soon as a reasonable technical report may be written about the work, and we still aim to inform the community of ongoing development through Issues.

Contibuting

• Do new development in feature branches with descriptive names.
• Bring your work up-to-date by rebasing onto the latest dev. (Polish your changes by interactive rebase, if you'd like.)
• Pull request your contribution to BVLC/caffe's dev branch for discussion and review.
  • PRs should live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful merge. Pull request sooner than later so that discussion can guide development.
  • Code must be accompanied by documentation and tests at all times.
  • Only fast-forward merges will be accepted.

See our development guidelines for further details–the more closely these are followed, the sooner your work will be merged.

Shelhamer's “life of a branch in four acts”

Make the feature branch off of the latest bvlc/dev

git checkout dev
git pull upstream dev
git checkout -b feature
# do your work, make commits

Prepare to merge by rebasing your branch on the latest bvlc/dev

# make sure dev is fresh
git checkout dev
git pull upstream dev
# rebase your branch on the tip of dev
git checkout feature
git rebase dev

Push your branch to pull request it into dev

git push origin feature
# ...make pull request to dev...

Now make a pull request! You can do this from the command line (git pull-request -b dev) if you install hub.

The pull request of feature into dev will be a clean merge. Applause.