Caffe Deep Learning Framework vs. TensorFlow

Caffe is only appropriate for some new beginners who don't want to write any lines of code, just want to use existing models for image recognition, or have some taste of the so-called Deep Learning.

Incentivized

TensorFlow is great for most deep learning purposes. This is especially true in two domains: 1. Computer vision: image classification, object detection and image generation via generative adversarial networks 2. Natural language processing: text classification and generation. The good community support often means that a lot of off-the-shelf models can be used to prove a concept or test an idea quickly. That, and Google's promotion of Colab means that ideas can be shared quite freely. Training, visualizing and debugging models is very easy in TensorFlow, compared to other platforms (especially the good old Caffe days). In terms of productionizing, it's a bit of a mixed bag. In our case, most of our feature building is performed via Apache Spark. This means having to convert Parquet (columnar optimized) files to a TensorFlow friendly format i.e., protobufs. The lack of good JVM bindings mean that our projects end up being a mix of Python and Scala. This makes it hard to reuse some of the tooling and support we wrote in Scala. This is where MXNet shines better (though its Scala API could do with more work).

Incentivized

• Caffe is good for traditional image-based CNN as this was its original purpose.

Incentivized

• A vast library of functions for all kinds of tasks - Text, Images, Tabular, Video etc.
• Amazing community helps developers obtain knowledge faster and get unblocked in this active development space.
• Integration of high-level libraries like Keras and Estimators make it really simple for a beginner to get started with neural network based models.

Incentivized

• Caffe's model definition - static configuration files are really painful. Maintaining big configuration files with so many parameters and details of many layers can be a really challenging task.
• Besides imagine and vision (CNN), Caffe also gradually adds some other NN architecture support. It doesn't play well in a recurrent domain, so we have to say variety is a problem.
• Caffe's deployment for production is not easy. The community support and project development all mean it is almost fading out of the market.
• The learning curve is quite steep. Although TensorFlow's is not easy to master either, the reward for Caffe is much less than the TensorFlow can offer.

Incentivized

• RNNs are still a bit lacking, compared to Theano.
• Cannot handle sequence inputs
• Theano is perhaps a bit faster and eats up less memory than TensorFlow on a given GPU, perhaps due to element-wise ops. Tensorflow wins for multi-GPU and “compilation” time.

Support of multiple components and ease of development.

Incentivized

Community support for TensorFlow is great. There's a huge community that truly loves the platform and there are many examples of development in TensorFlow. Often, when a new good technique is published, there will be a TensorFlow implementation not long after. This makes it quick to ally the latest techniques from academia straight to production-grade systems. Tooling around TensorFlow is also good. TensorBoard has been such a useful tool, I can't imagine how hard it would be to debug a deep neural network gone wrong without TensorBoard.

Incentivized

Use of cloud for better execution power is recommended.

Incentivized

TensorFlow is kind of low-level API most suited for those developers who like to control the details, while Keras provides some kind of high-level API for those users who want to boost their project or experiment by reusing most of the existing architecture or models and the accumulated best practice. However, Caffe isn't like either of them so the position for the user is kind of embarrassing.

Incentivized

Keras is built on top of TensorFlow, but it is much simpler to use and more Python style friendly, so if you don't want to focus on too many details or control and not focus on some advanced features, Keras is one of the best options, but as far as if you want to dig into more, for sure TensorFlow is the right choice

Incentivized

• Since we stopped using Caffe before it can reach the production phase, there is no clear ROI that can be defined.

Incentivized

• Learning is s bit difficult takes lot of time.
• Developing or implementing the whole neural network is time consuming with this, as you have to write everything.
• Once you have learned this, it make your job very easy of getting the good result.

Incentivized