microros-pi5-coral-tpu-models

MicroROS-Pi5 + Coral Edge TPU — model binaries

Edge TPU (.tflite) binaries used by the MicroROS-Pi5_Coral_TPU project — a Raspberry Pi 5 + Coral USB Accelerator + micro-ROS robot car that does person following with Re-ID identity lock (Nav2 path planning + active gimbal framing) and two-tape lane following driven by an Edge TPU segmentation net.

Two groups of binaries live here rather than in the git repo:

• Re-ID pairs (reid*/, ~85 MB) — co-compiled Edge TPU artifacts with no official upstream download. Documented below.
• Baseline models (objcls/, signcls/, line_seg/, line_geom/, line_imit/, ~10 MB) — retrainable artifacts of the project's own PyTorch → int8 PTQ → edgetpu_compiler pipeline (training/ in the repo). See Baseline models.

Why "co-compiled" matters (read this before mixing files)

Each subdirectory is one edgetpu_compiler co-compilation of two networks that share the same 8 MB of on-chip SRAM: a person detector (det_reid_edgetpu.tflite) and an appearance embedder (emb_reid_edgetpu.tflite). The compiler decides how to split cache between them.

⚠️ A det/emb pair from different directories will not work correctly together. Always take both files from the same directory. Mixing them means the two models fight over the SRAM cache and per-inference latency figures below no longer hold.

The detector is the same source in every pair (Coral's stock ssd_mobilenet_v2_coco_quant_postprocess, filtered to the person class); only the embedder differs.

Variants

Latency = median single embed() invoke, measured on real hardware (Pi 5 + Coral USB). "Swap rate" = fraction of frames where some bystander scored ≥ the target — i.e. how often identity would be confused — measured on 952 frames recorded from the actual robot (low, ground-level, upward-looking camera), not on a public benchmark.

⚠️ Market-1501-only models fail on a ground-level camera

reid_mnv2, reid_osnet05, reid_osnet075 score well on Market-1501 (OSNet ×0.75 is rank-1 93.7 %) but were measured unusable on this robot: with the camera sitting on the floor looking up at people, bystanders scored 0.72–0.89 against a target at 0.99 — overlapping ranges, so no threshold separates them.

The multi-source Youtu models push bystanders down to 0.12–0.47 on the same footage. The difference is training-data viewpoint diversity, not model capacity or benchmark score.

Lesson: Market-1501 rank-1 does not predict usability at your deployment viewpoint. A ground-level upward view is out-of-distribution for surveillance-style Re-ID datasets. Re-evaluate on footage from your own camera pose.

Keep these three only if your camera is at normal (eye-level or overhead) height.

Input / preprocessing (differs per embedder!)

All embedders take a 1×256×128×3 person crop and output an L2-normalised vector. Preprocessing is not uniform — branch on input_details[0]['dtype']:

Crop convention: crops should be tight vertical strips of the torso. Width is taken as min(box_width, box_height / 2) about the box centre — narrow boxes are used as-is and never widened. Stretching an arbitrary box to 128×256 (e.g. when arms are spread, or the person is clipped by the frame edge) distorts the embedding badly — in testing the same person dropped from 0.99 to 0.80, below a bystander at 0.72.

Usage

From the project repo, one command fetches everything:

git clone https://github.com/jiaheguo521/MicroROS-Pi5_Coral_TPU.git
cd MicroROS-Pi5_Coral_TPU
./deploy/fetch_models.sh            # downloads all variants by default
./deploy/fetch_models.sh reid_youtu_p70   # or just one
./deploy/fetch_models.sh line_seg         # baseline models work the same way

Or grab a single pair directly:

huggingface-cli download jiaheguo521/microros-pi5-coral-tpu-models \
  reid_youtu/det_reid_edgetpu.tflite reid_youtu/emb_reid_edgetpu.tflite --local-dir ./models

Thresholds are specific to each embedding space and must be re-calibrated when you switch variants — see the project README's field-tuning guide.

Baseline models (lane following / classification)

Built by the repo's training/build_*.py pipeline: PyTorch → ONNX → onnx2tf int8 PTQ → edgetpu_compiler. Every model passes the op-mapping gate — 1 Edge TPU subgraph, 0 CPU ops — so the whole graph runs on-chip. Each directory ships model_edgetpu.tflite + meta.json (+ labels.txt for classifiers).

Preprocessing contract: int8 input/output. Normalisation is done in Python, never in-graph (meta.json carries input_size + mean255/std255; the node computes (rgb - mean)/std, then quantises with the input scale/zero-point). BGR→RGB is an OpenCV call — an in-graph reverse fails to compile for the Edge TPU. See edgetpu_infer.py in the repo for the reference loader (it also auto-downloads a missing model dir from here).

Sources & licensing

Quantisation (INT8 PTQ) and Edge TPU co-compilation in this repo were done by the project author; the pruned Youtu variants use structured pruning + label-free distillation. Upstream licenses and dataset terms still apply — in particular Market-1501 is intended for non-commercial research.

Privacy note

Person Re-ID identifies and follows a specific individual. Deploy it only with the informed consent of the people being tracked, and check the rules that apply where you operate.