The plugin architecture of the Inference Engine allows to develop and plug independent inference solutions dedicated to different devices. Physically, a plugin is represented as a dynamic library exporting the single CreatePluginEngine
function that allows to create a new plugin instance.
Inference Engine Plugin Library
Inference Engine plugin dynamic library consists of several main components:
- Plugin class:
- Provides information about devices of a specific type.
- Can create an executable network instance which represents a Neural Network backend specific graph structure for a particular device in opposite to the InferenceEngine::ICNNNetwork interface which is backend-independent.
- Can import an already compiled graph structure from an input stream to an executable network object.
- Executable Network class:
- Is an execution configuration compiled for a particular device and takes into account its capabilities.
- Holds a reference to a particular device and a task executor for this device.
- Can create several instances of Inference Request.
- Can export an internal backend specific graph structure to an output stream.
- Inference Request class:
- Runs an inference pipeline serially.
- Can extract performance counters for an inference pipeline execution profiling.
- Asynchronous Inference Request class:
- Wraps the Inference Request class and runs pipeline stages in parallel on several task executors based on a device-specific pipeline structure.
NOTE: This documentation is written based on the Template
plugin, which demonstrates plugin
development details. Find the complete code of the Template
, which is fully compilable and up-to-date, at <dldt source dir>/docs/template_plugin
.
Detailed guides
API References