OpenVino or Coral - Today

[moogoos]

I have been using Coral for a couple years now. It's getting more and more cumbersome to use as kernels and distros keep moving forward, and building support for it gets more involved just to make it work. I've messed around with openvino on iGPU and an Arc A310 and the inference speeds are quite nice even comparable ~5ms. Is there any significant benefit to using Coral vs Openvino today? I think I prefer OpenVino with my testing but not sure what else I may miss or need to consider.

[inkeep-ai-assistant[bot]]

Based on your experience with both detectors, OpenVINO appears to be the better choice for your setup. Here's what the documentation shows:

Performance Comparison:
Your ~5ms inference speeds with OpenVINO are excellent and align with documented performance (1). The Intel Arc A310 shows ~5ms inference times for MobileNetV2, while your iGPU performance is also competitive (1).

Model Support Advantages:
OpenVINO supports a much broader range of modern model architectures compared to Coral (2)(3). While Coral is limited to primarily ssdlite and mobilenet model architectures (2), OpenVINO supports YOLO-NAS, YOLOv3, YOLOv4, YOLOv7, YOLOv9, YOLOx, and D-FINE models (3).

Frigate+ Compatibility:
For Frigate+ models, Intel hardware with OpenVINO is recommended for yolov9 model types, which offer higher accuracy than the mobiledet models that Coral is limited to (4). OpenVINO can run the more advanced YOLO-NAS and YOLOv9 models that provide better detection of small objects (4).

Hardware Flexibility:
OpenVINO runs on 6th Gen Intel platforms and newer with iGPU support, Intel Arc GPUs, and even AMD CPUs (3). You can also configure multiple OpenVINO detectors if needed for high camera loads (3):

detectors:
  ov_0:
    type: openvino
    device: GPU
  ov_1:
    type: openvino
    device: GPU

(3)

Maintenance Benefits:
Your observation about Coral's increasing complexity aligns with the technical reality - OpenVINO leverages standard GPU drivers that are actively maintained by Intel, while Coral requires specific EdgeTPU drivers and kernel compatibility (1).

Given your positive testing results and the documented advantages, OpenVINO appears to be the superior choice for your use case.

📚 Sources:

1. Recommended hardware
2. Supported Hardware
3. Supported Hardware
4. Models

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[NickM-27]

The main advantage of the coral is power usage, but if you're already using the GPU then that doesn't make a difference

[hawkeye217]

For me, the higher accuracy of the models available with GPUs outweighs any other concern. For some power usage is important, as @NickM-27 mentioned. I don't think there's really any other advantage.

[moogoos]

thank you both