Sometimes doing things the hard way is a lot easier. The more tools you use and the more complicated those tools are, the more complexity you have to deal with. So while it may be nice to call a few simple methods and have a framework do everything for you behind the scenes, you’ll have to to learn how the framework works and maybe realize down the line it can’t do everything you want it to do. There may even be incompatibilities with other parts of your program.
This week in my independent study, I tried to figure out how I could run a machine learning model on Android. I had some success, but quickly discovered some complications. Android has the option of using TensorFlow Lite, which seems great. However, I built my model using Keras, so I needed to convert the model. That was relatively straightforward, but before I started calling my model, I realized that I needed to extract audio features on Android. This required using Python code on Android, particularly Librosa and Numpy. This led me to other potential frameworks to get this to run.
This would lead to a bloated app, so I looked into Google Cloud services and thought about running server-side code there. I already set up a way to upload and download files with Google FireBase, so this seemed reasonable. But this is a paid service and would be even more work to make it functional.
I already have all the code running on my personal machine, so what if I just set up a server with a REST API to upload and download files and run the necessary Python code locally? If I could get that working, it would be trivial to call the code I’m already running.
Getting the server to upload and download files is what I did this week. I used Flask, which makes it very easy to get a basic server up and running. For the time being, data can only be transmitted via WiFi, as there will be uncompressed audio files transmitted back and forth.
While there was some additional work to figure out HTTP requests on Android, already knowing the basic building blocks gives me much more flexibility moving forward. But with great flexibility comes great responsibility, and proper error checking will be an important part of development moving forward. Security measures are also very important to consider before deploying an app to production.
The next iteration will involve running the machine learning code with a REST API call and getting back both the results of the model’s prediction and any data I will need to plot within the app.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Inquiries and Queries by James Young and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.