Embed images and sentences into fixed-length vectors with CLIP
CLIP-as-service is a low-latency high-scalability service for embedding images and text. It can be easily integrated as a microservice into neural search solutions.
β‘ Fast: Serve CLIP models with TensorRT, ONNX runtime and PyTorch w/o JIT with 800QPS[*]. Non-blocking duplex streaming on requests and responses, designed for large data and long-running tasks.
π« Elastic: Horizontally scale up and down multiple CLIP models on single GPU, with automatic load balancing.
π₯ Easy-to-use: No learning curve, minimalist design on client and server. Intuitive and consistent API for image and sentence embedding.
π Modern: Async client support. Easily switch between gRPC, HTTP, WebSocket protocols with TLS and compression.
π± Integration: Smooth integration with neural search ecosystem including Jina and DocArray. Build cross-modal and multi-modal solutions in no time.
[*] with default config (single replica, PyTorch no JIT) on GeForce RTX 3090.
An always-online server api.clip.jina.ai
loaded with ViT-L/14-336px
is there for you to play & test.
Before you start, make sure you have created access token from our console website,
or CLI as described in this guide.
jina auth token create <name of PAT> -e <expiration days>
Then, you need to set the created token in HTTP request header Authorization
as <your access token>
,
or configure it in the parameter credential
of the client in python.
demo-cas.jina.ai
is sunset and no longer available after 15th of Sept 2022.
via HTTPS π | via gRPC πβ‘β‘ |
curl \
-X POST https://api.clip.jina.ai:8443/post \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-H 'Authorization: <your access token>' \
-d '{"data":[{"text": "First do it"},
{"text": "then do it right"},
{"text": "then do it better"},
{"uri": "https://picsum.photos/200"}],
"execEndpoint":"/"}' |
# pip install clip-client
from clip_client import Client
c = Client(
'grpcs:https://api.clip.jina.ai:2096', credential={'Authorization': '<your access token>'}
)
r = c.encode(
[
'First do it',
'then do it right',
'then do it better',
'https://picsum.photos/200',
]
)
print(r) |
There are four basic visual reasoning skills: object recognition, object counting, color recognition, and spatial relation understanding. Let's try some:
You need to install
jq
(a JSON processor) to prettify the results.
CLIP-as-service consists of two Python packages clip-server
and clip-client
that can be installed independently. Both require Python 3.7+.
Pytorch Runtime β‘ | ONNX Runtime β‘β‘ | TensorRT Runtime β‘β‘β‘ |
pip install clip-server |
pip install "clip-server[onnx]" |
pip install nvidia-pyindex
pip install "clip-server[tensorrt]" |
You can also host the server on Google Colab, leveraging its free GPU/TPU.
pip install clip-client
You can run a simple connectivity check after install.
C/S | Command | Expect output |
---|---|---|
Server |
python -m clip_server |
|
Client |
from clip_client import Client
c = Client('grpc:https://0.0.0.0:23456')
c.profile() |
|
You can change 0.0.0.0
to the intranet or public IP address to test the connectivity over private and public network.
- Start the server:
python -m clip_server
. Remember its address and port. - Create a client:
from clip_client import Client c = Client('grpc:https://0.0.0.0:51000')
- To get sentence embedding:
r = c.encode(['First do it', 'then do it right', 'then do it better']) print(r.shape) # [3, 512]
- To get image embedding:
r = c.encode(['apple.png', # local image 'https://clip-as-service.jina.ai/_static/favicon.png', # remote image 'data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhEAAQAMQAAORHHOVSKudfOulrSOp3WOyDZu6QdvCchPGolfO0o/XBs/fNwfjZ0frl3/zy7////wAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACH5BAkAABAALAAAAAAQABAAAAVVICSOZGlCQAosJ6mu7fiyZeKqNKToQGDsM8hBADgUXoGAiqhSvp5QAnQKGIgUhwFUYLCVDFCrKUE1lBavAViFIDlTImbKC5Gm2hB0SlBCBMQiB0UjIQA7']) # in image URI print(r.shape) # [3, 512]
More comprehensive server and client user guides can be found in the docs.
Let's build a text-to-image search using CLIP-as-service. Namely, a user can input a sentence and the program returns matching images. We'll use the Totally Looks Like dataset and DocArray package. Note that DocArray is included within clip-client
as an upstream dependency, so you don't need to install it separately.
First we load images. You can simply pull them from Jina Cloud:
from docarray import DocumentArray
da = DocumentArray.pull('ttl-original', show_progress=True, local_cache=True)
or download TTL dataset, unzip, load manually
Alternatively, you can go to Totally Looks Like official website, unzip and load images:
from docarray import DocumentArray
da = DocumentArray.from_files(['left/*.jpg', 'right/*.jpg'])
The dataset contains 12,032 images, so it may take a while to pull. Once done, you can visualize it and get the first taste of those images:
da.plot_image_sprites()
Start the server with python -m clip_server
. Let's say it's at 0.0.0.0:51000
with GRPC
protocol (you will get this information after running the server).
Create a Python client script:
from clip_client import Client
c = Client(server='grpc:https://0.0.0.0:51000')
da = c.encode(da, show_progress=True)
Depending on your GPU and client-server network, it may take a while to embed 12K images. In my case, it took about two minutes.
Download the pre-encoded dataset
If you're impatient or don't have a GPU, waiting can be Hell. In this case, you can simply pull our pre-encoded image dataset:
from docarray import DocumentArray
da = DocumentArray.pull('ttl-embedding', show_progress=True, local_cache=True)
Let's build a simple prompt to allow a user to type sentence:
while True:
vec = c.encode([input('sentence> ')])
r = da.find(query=vec, limit=9)
r[0].plot_image_sprites()
Now you can input arbitrary English sentences and view the top-9 matching images. Search is fast and instinctive. Let's have some fun:
"a happy potato" | "a super evil AI" | "a guy enjoying his burger" |
---|---|---|
"professor cat is very serious" | "an ego engineer lives with parent" | "there will be no tomorrow so lets eat unhealthy" |
---|---|---|
Let's save the embedding result for our next example:
da.save_binary('ttl-image')
We can also switch the input and output of the last program to achieve image-to-text search. Precisely, given a query image find the sentence that best describes the image.
Let's use all sentences from the book "Pride and Prejudice".
from docarray import Document, DocumentArray
d = Document(uri='https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1342/1342-0.txt').load_uri_to_text()
da = DocumentArray(
Document(text=s.strip()) for s in d.text.replace('\r\n', '').split('.') if s.strip()
)
Let's look at what we got:
da.summary()
Documents Summary
Length 6403
Homogenous Documents True
Common Attributes ('id', 'text')
Attributes Summary
Attribute Data type #Unique values Has empty value
ββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββ
id ('str',) 6403 False
text ('str',) 6030 False
Now encode these 6,403 sentences, it may take 10 seconds or less depending on your GPU and network:
from clip_client import Client
c = Client('grpc:https://0.0.0.0:51000')
r = c.encode(da, show_progress=True)
Download the pre-encoded dataset
Again, for people who are impatient or don't have a GPU, we have prepared a pre-encoded text dataset:
from docarray import DocumentArray
da = DocumentArray.pull('ttl-textual', show_progress=True, local_cache=True)
Let's load our previously stored image embedding, randomly sample 10 image Documents, then find top-1 nearest neighbour of each.
from docarray import DocumentArray
img_da = DocumentArray.load_binary('ttl-image')
for d in img_da.sample(10):
print(da.find(d.embedding, limit=1)[0].text)
Fun time! Note, unlike the previous example, here the input is an image and the sentence is the output. All sentences come from the book "Pride and Prejudice".
Besides, there was truth in his looks | Gardiner smiled | whatβs his name | By tea time, however, the dose had been enough, and Mr | You do not look well |
βA gamester!β she cried | If you mention my name at the Bell, you will be attended to | Never mind Miss Lizzyβs hair | Elizabeth will soon be the wife of Mr | I saw them the night before last |
From 0.3.0
CLIP-as-service adds a new /rank
endpoint that re-ranks cross-modal matches according to their joint likelihood in CLIP model. For example, given an image Document with some predefined sentence matches as below:
from clip_client import Client
from docarray import Document
c = Client(server='grpc:https://0.0.0.0:51000')
r = c.rank(
[
Document(
uri='.github/README-img/rerank.png',
matches=[
Document(text=f'a photo of a {p}')
for p in (
'control room',
'lecture room',
'conference room',
'podium indoor',
'television studio',
)
],
)
]
)
print(r['@m', ['text', 'scores__clip_score__value']])
[['a photo of a television studio', 'a photo of a conference room', 'a photo of a lecture room', 'a photo of a control room', 'a photo of a podium indoor'],
[0.9920725226402283, 0.006038925610482693, 0.0009973491542041302, 0.00078492151806131, 0.00010626466246321797]]
One can see now a photo of a television studio
is ranked to the top with clip_score
score at 0.992
. In practice, one can use this endpoint to re-rank the matching result from another search system, for improving the cross-modal search quality.
![]() |
|
In the DALLΒ·E Flow project, CLIP is called for ranking the generated results from DALLΒ·E. It has an Executor wrapped on top of clip-client
, which calls .arank()
- the async version of .rank()
:
from clip_client import Client
from jina import Executor, requests, DocumentArray
class ReRank(Executor):
def __init__(self, clip_server: str, **kwargs):
super().__init__(**kwargs)
self._client = Client(server=clip_server)
@requests(on='/')
async def rerank(self, docs: DocumentArray, **kwargs):
return await self._client.arank(docs)
Intrigued? That's only scratching the surface of what CLIP-as-service is capable of. Read our docs to learn more.
- Join our Slack community and chat with other community members about ideas.
- Join our Engineering All Hands meet-up to discuss your use case and learn Jina's new features.
- When? The second Tuesday of every month
- Where? Zoom (see our public events calendar/.ical) and live stream on YouTube
- Subscribe to the latest video tutorials on our YouTube channel
CLIP-as-service is backed by Jina AI and licensed under Apache-2.0. We are actively hiring AI engineers, solution engineers to build the next neural search ecosystem in open-source.