TAO Toolkit Quick Start Guide

This page provides a video and text-based quick start guide for installing and running TAO Toolkit.

Hardware

The following system configuration is recommended to achieve reasonable training performance with TAO Toolkit and supported models provided:

  • 32 GB system RAM

  • 32 GB of GPU RAM

  • 8 core CPU

  • 1 NVIDIA GPU

  • 100 GB of SSD space

TAO Toolkit is supported on discrete GPUs, such as A100, A40, A30, A2, A16, A100x, A30x, V100, T4, Titan-RTX and Quadro-RTX.

Note

TAO Toolkit is not supported on GPU’s before the Pascal generation.


Software Requirements

Software

Version

Ubuntu LTS

20.04

python

>=3.6.9<3.7

docker-ce

>19.03.5

docker-API

1.40

nvidia-container-toolkit

>1.3.0-1

nvidia-container-runtime

3.4.0-1

nvidia-docker2

2.5.0-1

nvidia-driver

>510

python-pip

>21.06

Installing the Pre-requisites

The tao-launcher is strictly a python3 only package, capable of running on python 3.6.9 or 3.7.

  1. Install docker-ce by following the official instructions.

    Once you have installed docker-ce, follow the post-installation steps to ensure that the docker can be run without sudo.

  2. Install nvidia-container-toolkit by following the install-guide.

  3. Get an NGC account and API key:

    1. Go to NGC and click the TAO Toolkit container in the Catalog tab. This message is displayed: “Sign in to access the PULL feature of this repository”.

    2. Enter your Email address and click Next, or click Create an Account.

    3. Choose your organization when prompted for Organization/Team.

    4. Click Sign In.

  4. Log in to the NGC docker registry (nvcr.io) using the command docker login nvcr.io and enter the following credentials:

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    a. Username: "$oauthtoken" b. Password: "YOUR_NGC_API_KEY"


    where YOUR_NGC_API_KEY corresponds to the key you generated from step 3.

Note

DeepStream 6.0 - NVIDIA SDK for IVA inference is recommended.


Installing TAO Toolkit

TAO Toolkit is a Python pip package that is hosted on the NVIDIA PyIndex. The package uses the docker restAPI under the hood to interact with the NGC Docker registry to pull and instantiate the underlying docker containers. You must have an NGC account and an API key associated with your account. See the Installation Prerequisites section for details on creating an NGC account and obtaining an API key.

  1. Create a new conda environment using miniconda.

    1. Follow the instructions in this link to set up a conda environemnt using a miniconda.

    2. Once you have installed miniconda, create a new environment by setting the Python version to 3.6.

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      conda create -n launcher python=3.6

    3. Activate the conda environment that you have just created.

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      conda activate launcher

    4. Once you have activated your conda environement, the command prompt should show the name of your conda environment.

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      (launcher) py-3.6.9 desktop:

    5. When you are done with you session, you may deactivate your conda environemnt using the deactivate command:

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      conda deactivate

    6. You may re-instantiate this created conda environemnt using the following command.

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    conda activate launcher


  2. Install the TAO Launcher Python package called nvidia-tao.

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    pip3 install nvidia-tao

    Note

    If you had installed an older version of nvidia-tao launcher, you may upgrade to the latest version by running the following command.

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    pip3 install --upgrade nvidia-tao

  3. Invoke the entrypoints using the tao command.

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    tao --help

    The sample output of the above command is:

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    usage: tao [-h] {list,stop,info,augment,bpnet,classification,detectnet_v2,dssd,emotionnet,faster_rcnn,fpenet,gazenet,gesturenet, heartratenet,intent_slot_classification,lprnet,mask_rcnn,punctuation_and_capitalization,question_answering, retinanet,speech_to_text,ssd,text_classification,converter,token_classification,unet,yolo_v3,yolo_v4,yolo_v4_tiny} ... Launcher for TAO optional arguments: -h, --help show this help message and exit tasks: {list,stop,info,augment,bpnet,classification,detectnet_v2,dssd,emotionnet,faster_rcnn,fpenet,gazenet,gesturenet,heartratenet ,intent_slot_classification,lprnet,mask_rcnn,punctuation_and_capitalization,question_answering,retinanet,speech_to_text, ssd,text_classification,converter,token_classification,unet,yolo_v3,yolo_v4,yolo_v4_tiny}

    Note that under tasks you can see all the launcher-invokable tasks. The following are the specific tasks that help with handling the launched commands using the TAO Launcher:

    • list

    • stop

    • info

Note

When installing the TAO Toolkit Launcher to your host machine’s native python3 as opposed to the recommended route of using virtual environment, you may get an error saying that tao binary wasn’t found. This is because the path to your tao binary installed by pip wasn’t added to the PATH environment variable in your local machine. In this case, please run the following command:

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export PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin


Downloading Jupyter Noteboks and Resources

Downloading the sample notebooks

Example Jupyter notebooks for all the tasks that are supported in TAO Toolkit are available in NGC resources. TAO Toolkit provides sample workflows for Computer Vision and Conversational AI.

Computer Vision

All the samples for the supported computer vision tasks are hosted on ngc under the TAO Computer Vision Samples. To run the available examples, download this sample resource by using the following commands.

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wget --content-disposition https://api.ngc.nvidia.com/v2/resources/nvidia/tao/cv_samples/versions/v1.4.0/zip -O cv_samples_v1.4.0.zip unzip -u cv_samples_v1.4.0.zip -d ./cv_samples_v1.4.0 && rm -rf cv_samples_v1.4.0.zip && cd ./cv_samples_v1.4.0

Purpose-Built Pre-trained Models

The following is a list of purpose-built pretrained models mapped with their corresponding samples.

Model Name

Jupyter Notebook

VehicleTypeNet

classification/classification.ipynb

VehicleMakeNet

classification/classification.ipynb

TrafficCamNet

detectnet_v2/detectnet_v2.ipynb

PeopleSegNet

mask_rcnn/mask_rcnn.ipynb

PeopleNet

detectnet_v2/detectnet_v2.ipynb

License Plate Recognition

lprnet/lprnet.ipynb

License Plate Detection

detectnet_v2/detectnet_v2.ipynb

Heart Rate Estimation

heartratenet/heartratenet.ipynb

Gesture Recognition

gesturenet/gesturenet.ipynb

Gaze Estimation

gazenet/gazenet.ipynb

Facial Landmark

fpenet/fpenet.ipynb

FaceDetectIR

detectnet_v2/detectnet_v2.ipynb

FaceDetect

facenet/facenet.ipynb

Emotion Recognition

emotionnet/emotionnet.ipynb

DashCamNet

detectnet_v2/detectnet_v2.ipynb

BodyPoseNet

bpnet/bpnet.ipynb

ActionRecognitionNet

actionrecognitionnet/actionrecognitionnet.ipynb

Pose Classification

pose_classification_net/poseclassificationnet.ipynb

PointPillars

pointpillars/pointpillars.ipynb

Open model architecture

Network Architecture

Jupyter Notebook

DetectNet_v2

detectnet_v2/detectnet_v2.ipynb

FasterRCNN

faster_rcnn/faster_rcnn.ipynb

YOLOv3

yolo_v3/yolo_v3.ipynb

YOLOv4

yolo_v4/yolo_v4.ipynb

YOLOv4-tiny

yolo_v4_tiny/yolo_v4_tiny.ipynb

SSD

ssd/ssd.ipynb

DSSD

dssd/dssd.ipynb

RetinaNet

retinanet/retinanet.ipynb

MaskRCNN

mask_rcnn/mask_rcnn.ipynb

UNET

unet/unet_isbi.ipynb

Classification

classification/classification.ipynb

EfficientDet

efficientdet/efficientdet.ipynb

PointPillars

pointpillars/pointpillars.ipynb

Conversational AI

The TAO Conversational AI package, provides several end to end sample workflows to train conversational AI models using TAO Toolkit and subsequently deploying them to Riva. You can find these samples at:

Conversational AI Task

Jupyter Notebooks

Speech to Text Citrinet

Speech to Text Citrinet Notebook

Speech to Text Conformer

Speech to Text Conformer Notebook

Question Answering

Question Answering Notebook

Text Classification

Text Classification Notebook

Token Classification

Token Classification Notebook

Punctuation and Capitalization

Punctuation Capitalization Notebook

Intent and Slot Classification

Intent Slot Classification Notebook

NGram Language Model

NGram Language Model Notebook

Text to Speech

Text to Speech Notebook

You can download these resources, by using the NGC CLI command available at the NGC resource page. Once you download the respective tutorial resource, you may instantiate the jupyter notebook server.

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pip3 install jupyter jupyter notebook --ip 0.0.0.0 --allow-root --port 8888

Copy and paste the link produced from this command into your browser to access the notebook. The /workspace/examples folder will contain a demo notebook. Feel free to use any free port available to host the notebook if port 8888 is unavailable.

Downloading the Models

The TAO Toolkit Docker gives you access to a repository of pretrained models that can serve as a starting point when training deep neural networks. These models are hosted on the NGC. To download the models, please download the NGC CLI and install it. More information about the NGC Catalog CLI is available here. Once you have installed the CLI, you may follow the instructions below to configure the NGC CLI and download the models.

Listing all available models

Use this command to get a list of models that are hosted in the NGC model registry:

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ngc registry model list <model_glob_string>

Here is an example of using this command for the computer vision models:

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ngc registry model list nvidia/tao/pretrained_*

This command gives us a list of the pretrained backbones available for different tasks:

  • Classification

  • Object Detection with Detectnet_v2

  • Object Detection with SSD/DSSD/YOLOv3/YOLOv4/YOLOv4-Tiny/FasterRCNN/RetinaNet

  • Object Detection with EfficientDet

  • Instance Segmentation

  • Semantic Segmentation

Note

All our classification models have names based on this template: nvidia/tao/pretrained_classification:<template>.

To view the full list of computer vision and conversational AI models, use the following command:

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ngc registry model list nvidia/tao/*


Downloading a model

Use this command to download the model you have chosen from the NGC model registry:

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ngc registry model download-version <org/team/model_name:version> -dest <path_to_download_dir>

For example, use this command to download the resnet 18 classification model to the $USER_EXPERIMENT_DIR directory:

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ngc registry model download-version nvidia/tao/pretrained_classification:resnet18 --dest $USER_EXPERIMENT_DIR/pretrained_resnet18

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Downloaded 82.41 MB in 9s, Download speed: 9.14 MB/s ---------------------------------------------------- Transfer id: pretrained_classification_vresnet18 Download status: Completed. Downloaded local path: /workspace/tao-experiments/pretrained_resnet18/ Total files downloaded: 2 Total downloaded size: 82.41 MB Started at: 2019-07-16 01:29:53.028400 Completed at: 2019-07-16 01:30:02.053016 Duration taken: 9s seconds

Once you have downloaded the notebook samples and required pretrained models, you can start the respective sample notebook with the following command:

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jupyter notebook --ip 0.0.0.0 --port 8888 --allow-root

Open an internet browser on localhost and navigate to the following URL:

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http://0.0.0.0:8888

Note

If you want to run the notebook from a remote server then please follow these steps.

Execute the cells in the notebook to train a model using TAO Toolkit.

Once training is complete, follow these instructions to deploy a computer vision model to DeepStream. For Conversational AI models, follow the instructions in this section.

© Copyright 2022, NVIDIA.. Last updated on Dec 13, 2022.