How to Do Distributed Deep Learning for Object Detection Using Horovod on Azure

This post is co-authored by Mary Wahl, Data Scientist, Xiaoyong Zhu, Program Manager, Siyu Yang, Software Development Engineer, and Wee Hyong Tok, Principal Data Scientist Manager, at Microsoft. Object detection powers some of the most widely adopted computer vision applications, from people counting in crowd control to pedestrian detection used by self-driving cars. Training an object detection model can take up to weeks on a single GPU, a prohibitively long time for experimenting with hyperparameters and model architectures. This blog will show how you can train an object detection model by distributing deep learning training to multiple GPUs. These GPUs can be on a single machine or several machines.