Mini-Caffe

Minimal runtime core of Caffe. This repo is aimed to provide a minimal runtime of Caffe for those want to run Caffe model.

Update

• 2017/01/16. Build with x64 and remove many code.
• 2016/12/11. Mini-Caffe now only depends on OpenBLAS and protobuf.

What can mini-caffe do?

This repo has no CUDA, no Caffe tools which means you can only use mini-caffe to run the nerual network model in CPU mode. You should train the nerual model use caffe tools on *nix platform, mini-caffe is just an optional choice for testing the nerual model on Windows platform. If you want a fully ported Caffe, you may refer to happynear/caffe-windows or Microsoft/caffe.

Which compiler?

VC12 in Visual Studio 2013. We only build for x64, if you know the difference, it can be easily doned with x86. What's more, We also need CMake.

3rdparty libraries

Since Caffe depends on many 3rdparty libraries, I have modified some code to remove the libraries Caffe use.

• no CUDA
• no DataLayer for train
• no HDF5

but we still need libraries below.

• OpenCV
• Boost
• gflags
• glog
• protobuf
• openblas

We can download pre-compiled OpenCV and Boost, and set two environment variables OpenCV_DIR and Boost_DIR. For example, OpenCV_DIR = D:\3rdparty\opencv2.4.8\build and Boost_DIR = D:\3rdparty\boost_1_57_0. Pay attention to the Compiler version and build Architecture, which will be VC12 and x86.

For openblas, I already put the library in the source code.

gflags, glog, protobuf can be compiled by ourself, I add these libraries as submodules of mini-caffe.

To compile these libraries yourself, you should download the source code first.

git submodule update --init

all source code are under 3rdparty/src.

protobuf

cd 3rdparty/src/protobuf/cmake
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF -G "Visual Studio 12 2013 Win64"

use VS2013 to compile protobuf. Debug and Release.

Once you have compiled these libraries, you need collect header files and lib files to 3rdparty/include and 3rdparty/lib. I provide a script for collecting, just run copydeps.bat, it will also copy dll files to 3rdparty/bin.

cmake for mini-caffe

Before we use cmake to generate vs solution file, we need to use protoc.exe to generate caffe.pb.h and caffe.pb.cc. Run generatepb.bat will use proto.exe and copy files to include folder and source folder.

mini-caffe.sln is the solution file for VS2013.

Embed mini-caffe

To use mini-caffe as a sub-project, you may refer to mini-caffe-example.