I was advised by domain experts to check out the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK). The big advantage of CNTK is rich documentation and end-2-end examples available. In my scenario (Object Recognition) I found following resources particularly useful:
- Object Detection using CNTK
This tutorial was my entry point. You will find there exact, step-by-step instructions on how to build an object recognition solution together with sample data sets. It also provides some scientific background for those who want to learn how this works.
- End-2-end solution
This one bases on the original tutorial from the first link. However, it takes it further by introducing the complete E2E solution, including:
- managing reference pictures
- building repository for metadata
- training the object recognition model
- managing training results
- Advanced reporting based on PowerBI
- Publishing the CNTK model as a web service, so recognition results can be easily consumed.
- Upgrade to Faster R-CNN
First 2 tutorials are using an algorithm called Fast R-CNN. It is good, but CNTK released also its improved version called Faster R-CNN. This tutorial provides scripts that utilize that improved algorithm. Because it bases on the same sample dataset, you can simply compare results from both tutorials. From my experience, Faster R-CNN is not actually quicker, but it provides better recognition rates.
