Inference Engine Extensibility API allows to add support of custom operations to the Inference Engine. Extension should contain operation sets with custom operations and execution kernels for custom operations. Physically, an extension library can be represented as a dynamic library exporting the single CreateExtension
function that allows to create a new extension instance.
Extensibility library can be loaded to the InferenceEngine::Core object using the InferenceEngine::Core::AddExtension method.
Inference Engine Extension dynamic library contains several main components:
ngraph::Function
with unsupported operationsNOTE: This documentation is written based on the
Template extension
, which demonstrates extension
development details. Find the complete code of the Template extension
, which is fully compilable and up-to-date, at <dldt source tree>/docs/template_extension
.
The Inference Engine workflow involves the creation of custom kernels and either custom or existing operations.
An Operation is a Network building block implemented in the training framework, for example, Convolution
in Caffe*. A Kernel is defined as the corresponding implementation in the Inference Engine.
Refer to the Custom Layers in the Model Optimizer section for details on how mapping between framework layers and Inference Engine kernels is registered.
In short, you can plug your own kernel implementations into the Inference Engine and map them to the layers in the original framework.
The following pages describe how to integrate custom kernels into the Inference Engine:
Shape Inference API and some methods of extensibility mechanism was deprecated and will be removed soon. Old Extensibility mechanism contains two parts shape inference and execution kernel.