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')

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