I am building a tensorflow_object_detection_api setup locally, and the hope is to transfer all the setup to a computer cluster I have access to through my school, and train the model there. The environment is hard to set up on the shared linux system on the cluster, so I am trying to do as much locally as possible, and hopefully just ship everything there and run the training command. My question is, can I generate the tfrecords locally and just transfer them to the cluster? I am asking this because I don't know how these records work,, do they include links to the actual local directories? or do they contain all the necessary information in them?
P.S. I tried to generate them on the cluster, but the environment is tricky to set up: tensorflow and opencv are installed in a singularity which needs to be called to run any script with tf or opencv, but that singularity does not have the necessary requirements to run the script which generates the tfrecords from csv annotations.
I am pertty new to most of this so any help is appreciated.
Yes. I tried it and it worked. Apparently, tfrecords contain all the images and their annotations; all I needed to do is transfer the weights to Colab and start training.