# Object Detection TPU Inference Exporter

This package contains SavedModel Exporter for TPU Inference of object detection
models.

## Usage

This Exporter is intended for users who have trained models with CPUs / GPUs,
but would like to use them for inference on TPU without changing their code or
re-training their models.

Users are assumed to have:

+   `PIPELINE_CONFIG`: A pipeline_pb2.TrainEvalPipelineConfig config file;
+   `CHECKPOINT`: A model checkpoint trained on any device;

and need to correctly set:

+   `EXPORT_DIR`: Path to export SavedModel;
+   `INPUT_PLACEHOLDER`: Name of input placeholder in model's signature_def_map;
+   `INPUT_TYPE`: Type of input node, which can be one of 'image_tensor',
    'encoded_image_string_tensor', or 'tf_example';
+   `USE_BFLOAT16`: Whether to use bfloat16 instead of float32 on TPU.

The model can be exported with:

```
python object_detection/tpu_exporters/export_saved_model_tpu.py \
    --pipeline_config_file=<PIPELINE_CONFIG> \
    --ckpt_path=<CHECKPOINT> \
    --export_dir=<EXPORT_DIR> \
    --input_placeholder_name=<INPUT_PLACEHOLDER> \
    --input_type=<INPUT_TYPE> \
    --use_bfloat16=<USE_BFLOAT16>
```