The IoT Analytics Benchmark released last year dealt with an important Internet of Things use case—monitoring factory sensor data for impending failure conditions. This year, we are tackling an equally important use case—image classification. Whether used in facial recognition, license plate readers, inspection systems, or autonomous vehicles, neural network–based deep learning is making image detection and classification a viable technology.
As in the classic machine learning used in the original IoT Analytics Benchmark code (which used the Spark Machine Learning Library), the new deep learning code first trains a model using pre-labeled images and then deploys that model to infer the classification of new images. For IoT this inference step is the most important. Thus, the new programs, designated as IoT Analytics Benchmark DL, use previously trained models (included in the kit) to demonstrate inferencing that can be performed at the edge (on small gateway systems) or in scaled-out Spark clusters.