Monthly Archives: February 2021


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Same as above.


Installing TensorFlow 2 Object detection on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 1

Following are some rough notes on Installing TensorFlow 2 Object detection on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
We were following this guide (https://tensorflow-object-detection-api-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install.html) so we will be skipping some steps.

We had conda installed already from an older attempt so the following steps worked just fine.

conda create -n tensorflow pip python=3.8;
conda activate tensorflow;

We got an error with the following command so we used pip3 instead of pip.

pip install --ignore-installed --upgrade tensorflow==2.2.0;
Command 'pip' not found, but there are 18 similar ones.
pip3 install --ignore-installed --upgrade tensorflow==2.2.0;

Executing the above gave us another error:

Collecting tensorflow==2.2.0
Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement tensorflow==2.2.0 (from versions: 0.12.1, 1.0.0, 1.0.1, 1.1.0rc0, 1.1.0rc1, 1.1.0rc2, 1.1.0, 1.2.0rc0, 1.2.0rc1, 1.2.0rc2, 1.2.0, 1.2.1, 1.3.0rc0, 1.3.0rc1, 1.3.0rc2, 1.3.0, 1.4.0rc0, 1.4.0rc1, 1.4.0, 1.4.1, 1.5.0rc0, 1.5.0rc1, 1.5.0, 1.5.1, 1.6.0rc0, 1.6.0rc1, 1.6.0, 1.7.0rc0, 1.7.0rc1, 1.7.0, 1.7.1, 1.8.0rc0, 1.8.0rc1, 1.8.0, 1.9.0rc0, 1.9.0rc1, 1.9.0rc2, 1.9.0, 1.10.0rc0, 1.10.0rc1, 1.10.0, 1.10.1, 1.11.0rc0, 1.11.0rc1, 1.11.0rc2, 1.11.0, 1.12.0rc0, 1.12.0rc1, 1.12.0rc2, 1.12.0, 1.12.2, 1.12.3, 1.13.0rc0, 1.13.0rc1, 1.13.0rc2, 1.13.1, 1.13.2, 1.14.0rc0, 1.14.0rc1, 1.14.0, 2.0.0a0, 2.0.0b0, 2.0.0b1)
No matching distribution found for tensorflow==2.2.0

To fix it we upgraded pip using the following command.

python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip;

Then we tried again, which installed most packets but gave a new error:

pip3 install --ignore-installed --upgrade tensorflow==2.2.0;
ERROR: pip's dependency resolver does not currently take into account all the packages that are installed. This behaviour is the source of the following dependency conflicts.
launchpadlib 1.10.6 requires testresources, which is not installed.
Successfully installed absl-py-0.11.0 astunparse-1.6.3 cachetools-4.2.1 certifi-2020.12.5 chardet-4.0.0 gast-0.3.3 google-auth-1.27.0 google-auth-oauthlib-0.4.2 google-pasta-0.2.0 grpcio-1.35.0 h5py-2.10.0 idna-2.10 importlib-metadata-3.4.0 keras-preprocessing-1.1.2 markdown-3.3.3 numpy-1.19.5 oauthlib-3.1.0 opt-einsum-3.3.0 protobuf-3.14.0 pyasn1-0.4.8 pyasn1-modules-0.2.8 requests-2.25.1 requests-oauthlib-1.3.0 rsa-4.7.1 scipy-1.4.1 setuptools-53.0.0 six-1.15.0 tensorboard-2.2.2 tensorboard-plugin-wit-1.8.0 tensorflow-2.2.0 tensorflow-estimator-2.2.0 termcolor-1.1.0 typing-extensions-3.7.4.3 urllib3-1.26.3 werkzeug-1.0.1 wheel-0.36.2 wrapt-1.12.1 zipp-3.4.0

To fix this error we used:

sudo apt install python3-testresources;

Then tried again the pip installation with success.

pip3 install --ignore-installed --upgrade tensorflow==2.2.0;
Successfully installed absl-py-0.11.0 astunparse-1.6.3 cachetools-4.2.1 certifi-2020.12.5 chardet-4.0.0 gast-0.3.3 google-auth-1.27.0 google-auth-oauthlib-0.4.2 google-pasta-0.2.0 grpcio-1.35.0 h5py-2.10.0 idna-2.10 importlib-metadata-3.4.0 keras-preprocessing-1.1.2 markdown-3.3.3 numpy-1.19.5 oauthlib-3.1.0 opt-einsum-3.3.0 protobuf-3.14.0 pyasn1-0.4.8 pyasn1-modules-0.2.8 requests-2.25.1 requests-oauthlib-1.3.0 rsa-4.7.1 scipy-1.4.1 setuptools-53.0.0 six-1.15.0 tensorboard-2.2.2 tensorboard-plugin-wit-1.8.0 tensorflow-2.2.0 tensorflow-estimator-2.2.0 termcolor-1.1.0 typing-extensions-3.7.4.3 urllib3-1.26.3 werkzeug-1.0.1 wheel-0.36.2 wrapt-1.12.1 zipp-3.4.0

We then executed the following to test the installation:

python3 -c "import tensorflow as tf;print(tf.reduce_sum(tf.random.normal([1000, 1000])))";

Then we proceeded to get the TensorFlow models:

mkdir ~/TensorFlow;
cd ~/TensorFlow;
git clone https://github.com/tensorflow/models;

We then downloaded protobufs and extracted them to our home directory.
To test the installation we did the following.

export PATH="/home/bob/protoc-3.14.0-linux-x86_64:$PATH";
cd /home/bob/TensorFlow/models/research;
protoc object_detection/protos/*.proto --python_out=.;

Then we proceeded to the COCO installation:

pip3 install cython;

The above will solve the problem of:

gcc: error: pycocotools/_mask.c: No such file or directory
cd ~;
git clone https://github.com/cocodataset/cocoapi.git;
cd cocoapi/PythonAPI;
make;
cp -r pycocotools ~/TensorFlow/models/research/;

Finally we proceeded to Install the Object Detection API.

cd ~/TensorFlow/models/research/;
cp object_detection/packages/tf2/setup.py .;
python3 -m pip install .;

To test the installation we executed the following:

python3 object_detection/builders/model_builder_tf2_test.py;

We then downloaded the samples and executed the camera sample with success!!

To check against a video instead of a camera, we changed the following line from:

cap = cv2.VideoCapture(0)

to

cap = cv2.VideoCapture('/home/bob/Desktop/a2/A01_20210210164306.mp4')

How to see the isc2.org Webex Online Instructor-Led courses using your browser only

Recently, we registered for some online instructor-led courses in isc2.org.
We were using a Ubuntu GNU/Linux machine with the latest Firefox / Chromium and even Chrome versions.
There was something wrong with the meeting. When clicking on the Join button, instead of loading, it was trying to download a java applet configuration (CiscoWebExServlet).
After reading about those files and a lot of work, which included setting up a 32-bit version of Firefox with a 32-bit version of the Oracle JRE and installing IcedTea, we managed to connect to the meeting, but we had no audio.

When trying to connect to the meeting via phone, we got no voice.

When trying the mobile application, it required a password, which was never supplied.

So, we had to find another way in!

Using the Network tab of the Inspect Element menu, we clicked on the gear in the upper right corner and enabled the Persist Log option. Then we clicked on the Join button and logged all redirects with their parameters.

In isc2.org virtual class, the Join button has a custom link to https://www.cirqlive.com/, which is used to join the meetings.
Once you click on that button, the browser follows several redirects between webex.com and cirqlive.com, and it ends up on this page https://isc2training.webex.com/tc3300/webcomponents/docshow/meetingframe.do?siteurl=isc2training asking to download the servlet.

From the logged redirects of the above link, we got the request to https://isc2training.webex.com/tc3300/m.do where we got the meeting ID and password in the POST parameters.
Then went to https://signin.webex.com/join added the meeting ID, which led us to this page https://isc2training.webex.com/isc2training/e.php?AT=SI&From=GPS&MK=XXXXXXXX (using fake meeting ID)
We filled in the Session Password and clicked on Join by browser, and we could join as expected.