inference

notebooks | supervision | autodistill | maestro

Make Any Camera an AI Camera

Inference turns any computer or edge device into a command center for your computer vision projects.

• 🛠️ Self-host your own fine-tuned models
• 🧠 Access the latest and greatest foundation models (like Florence-2, CLIP, and SAM2)
• 🤝 Use Workflows to track, count, time, measure, and visualize
• 👁️ Combine ML with traditional CV methods (like OCR, Barcode Reading, QR, and template matching)
• 📈 Monitor, record, and analyze predictions
• 🎥 Manage cameras and video streams
• 📬 Send notifications when events happen
• 🛜 Connect with external systems and APIs
• 🔗 Extend with your own code and models
• 🚀 Deploy production systems at scale

See Example Workflows for common use-cases like detecting small objects with SAHI, multi-model consensus, active learning, reading license plates, blurring faces, background removal, and more.

Time In Zone Workflow Example

🔥 quickstart

Install Docker (and NVIDIA Container Toolkit for GPU acceleration if you have a CUDA-enabled GPU). Then run

pip install inference-cli && inference server start --dev

This will pull the proper image for your machine and start it in development mode.

In development mode, a Jupyter notebook server with a quickstart guide runs on http://localhost:9001/notebook/start. Dive in there for a whirlwind tour of your new Inference Server's functionality!

Now you're ready to connect your camera streams and start building & deploying Workflows in the UI or interacting with your new server via its API.

🛠️ build with Workflows

A key component of Inference is Workflows, composable blocks of common functionality that give models a common interface to make chaining and experimentation easy.

With Workflows, you can:

• Detect, classify, and segment objects in images using state-of-the-art models.
• Use Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to make determinations at any stage in a workflow.
• Seamlessly swap out models for a given task.
• Chain models together.
• Track, count, time, measure, and visualize objects.
• Add business logic and extend functionality to work with your external systems.

Workflows allow you to extend simple model predictions to build computer vision micro-services that fit into a larger application or fully self-contained visual agents that run on a video stream.

Learn more, read the Workflows docs, or start building.

📟 connecting via api

Once you've installed Inference, your machine is a fully-featured CV center. You can use its API to run models and workflows on images and video streams. By default, the server is running locally on localhost:9001.

To interface with your server via Python, use our SDK:

pip install inference-sdk

Then run an example model comparison Workflow like this:

from inference_sdk import InferenceHTTPClient

client = InferenceHTTPClient(
    api_url="http://localhost:9001", # use local inference server
    # api_key="<YOUR API KEY>" # optional to access your private data and models
)

result = client.run_workflow(
    workspace_name="roboflow-docs",
    workflow_id="model-comparison",
    images={
        "image": "https://media.roboflow.com/workflows/examples/bleachers.jpg"
    },
    parameters={
        "model1": "yolov8n-640",
        "model2": "yolov11n-640"
    }
)

print(result)

In other languages, use the server's REST API; you can access the API docs for your server at /docs (OpenAPI format) or /redoc (Redoc Format).

Check out the inference_sdk docs to see what else you can do with your new server.

🎥 connect to video streams

The inference server is a video processing beast. You can set it up to run Workflows on RTSP streams, webcam devices, and more. It will handle hardware acceleration, multiprocessing, video decoding and GPU batching to get the most out of your hardware.

This example workflow will watch a stream for frames that CLIP thinks match an inputted text prompt.

from inference_sdk import InferenceHTTPClient
import atexit
import time

max_fps = 4

client = InferenceHTTPClient(
    api_url="http://localhost:9001", # use local inference server
    # api_key="<YOUR API KEY>" # optional to access your private data and models
)

# Start a stream on an rtsp stream
result = client.start_inference_pipeline_with_workflow(
    video_reference=["rtsp://user:password@192.168.0.100:554/"],
    workspace_name="roboflow-docs",
    workflow_id="clip-frames",
    max_fps=max_fps,
    workflows_parameters={
        "prompt": "blurry", # change to look for something else
        "threshold": 0.16
    }
)

pipeline_id = result["context"]["pipeline_id"]

# Terminate the pipeline when the script exits
atexit.register(lambda: client.terminate_inference_pipeline(pipeline_id))

while True:
  result = client.consume_inference_pipeline_result(pipeline_id=pipeline_id)

  if not result["outputs"] or not result["outputs"][0]:
    # still initializing
    continue

  output = result["outputs"][0]
  is_match = output.get("is_match")
  similarity = round(output.get("similarity")*100, 1)
  print(f"Matches prompt? {is_match} (similarity: {similarity}%)")

  time.sleep(1/max_fps)

Pipeline outputs can be consumed via API for downstream processing or the Workflow can be configured to call external services with Notification blocks (like Email or Twilio) or the Webhook block. For more info on video pipeline management, see the Video Processing overview.

If you have a Roboflow account & have linked an API key, you can also remotely monitor and manage your running streams via the Roboflow UI.

🔑 connect to the cloud

Without an API Key, you can access a wide range of pre-trained and foundational models and run public Workflows.

Pass an optional Roboflow API Key to the inference_sdk or API to access additional features enhanced by Roboflow's Cloud platform. When running with an API Key, usage is metered according to Roboflow's pricing tiers.

	Open Access	With API Key (Metered)
Pre-Trained Models	✅	✅
Foundation Models	✅	✅
Video Stream Management	✅	✅
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