Hi @Nic-Ma I've had a chance to put some ideas together and see if we can get our workflow classes to play along with them. My thought was to define a dataset which can represent the input source of streaming data. This would be fed by whatever the actual source is, eg. something capturing frames from a video source or something reading from a sensor. This dataset would be iterable so inherently can represent an infinite series of data items, and when not receiving anything can just wait and not yield anything. A second part would be a transform in the postprocessing part of the workflow which acts as the sink or consumer of what's being predicted by the network. This would hand off tensors to whatever the actual sink for the stream would be, and would do what conversions were needed. I have put these ideas together in the following demo which should run as a standalone script file:

from queue import Empty, Queue
import time
from threading import Thread, RLock
from monai.engines import SupervisedEvaluator
from monai.transforms import Transform
from monai.utils.enums import CommonKeys
import torch

class IterableBufferDataset(torch.utils.data.IterableDataset):
    """Defines a iterable dataset using a Queue object to permit asynchronous additions of new items, eg. frames."""

    STOP = object()  # stop sentinel

    def __init__(self, buffer_size: int = 0, timeout: float = 0.01):
        super().__init__()
        self.buffer_size = buffer_size
        self.timeout = timeout
        self.buffer: Queue = Queue(self.buffer_size)
        self._is_running = False
        self._lock = RLock()

    @property
    def is_running(self):
        with self._lock:
            return self._is_running

    def add_item(self, item):
        """
        The idea is that the source of the streaming data would add items here and these would be consumed by the
        engine immediately. The engine's `run` method would be running in the main or some other thread separate from
        the source, eg. something reading from port or from a device which puts individual video frames here.
        """
        self.buffer.put(item, timeout=self.timeout)

    def stop(self):
        with self._lock:
            self._is_running = False

    def __iter__(self):
        """
        This will continually attempt to get an item from the queue until STOP is received or stop() called.
        """
        with self._lock:
            self._is_running = True

        try:
            while self.is_running:  # checking exit condition prevents deadlock
                try:
                    item = self.buffer.get(timeout=self.timeout)

                    if item is IterableBufferDataset.STOP:  # stop looping when sentinel received
                        break

                    yield item
                except Empty:
                    pass  # queue was empty this time, try again
        finally:
            self.stop()

ds = IterableBufferDataset()

def stream_source():
    """Adds items into the dataset as if this were an asynchronous source of streaming data."""
    for i in range(1, 6):
        ds.add_item(torch.full((i,), i))
        time.sleep(0.5)

    ds.add_item(ds.STOP)

t = Thread(target=stream_source)
t.start()

class StreamSink(Transform):
    """Represents a sink of streaming data, this postprocess transform will consume from the network as it arrives."""

    def __call__(self, data):
        print("Stream sink:", data[CommonKeys.PRED])

class Trace(torch.nn.Module):
    """Simple test network which just squares input."""

    def forward(self, x):
        print("Net input:", x)
        return x**2

# The engine should be set to not decollate and use the dataset directly as the loader, this will have the fewest things
# being done to the data between when it arrives and when it goes to the sink.
evaluator = SupervisedEvaluator(
    device="cpu", val_data_loader=ds, network=Trace(), epoch_length=1, decollate=False, postprocessing=StreamSink()
)

# monai/engines/workflow.py:140 makes a check against epoch_length which isn't valid, epoch_length can be left as None
# to permit arbitrary length data loading
evaluator.state.epoch_length = None

evaluator.run()

Also the codebase changes in #8146 may not be bad additions anyway even if not needed for streaming.

Hi @ericspod ,

Thanks for your sharing. I also built a very similar prototype locally last week for this streaming method, I tried to make a subclass inheriting from both MONAI IterableDataset and python Queue.
We can involve many people for the discussion.

Thanks.

This is a good start for some use cases so we should continue this development for 1.5. We should consider what use cases people who want to do streaming inference have, real time or not. Some will come with bundles or other applications written with MONAI and so will want to use MONAI transforms, engine classes, and other things to do this work, which is what we're targeting here. Others will want to do things much faster with more integrated infrastructure like TensorRT or with more low level streaming software like gstreamer. For these use cases it means bundles with engine classes and everything else they use may not be suitable, so users will have to pull the components apart to fit into this other workflow somehow. Some users will want to use Holoscan, DeepStream, or some other technology as well. So I'd say we're off to a good start but need to discuss what the other use cases are.

@ericspod Make sense to me.
Add @MMelQin to the discussion as Ming is expert on model inference and deployment.

Thanks.

related PR:
#8146
#8151

@Nic-Ma and @KumoLiu
Adding this writeup for MONAI model server for the sake of completion https://monai.medium.com/hacking-torchserve-and-triton-inference-server-for-monai-and-medical-imaging-b0564069f48e

Just to crossref, #8172 is along similar lines in that real-time inference and streaming have many common elements.

@Nic-Ma, @KumoLiu, @ericspod
Do you think it makes sense to implement a bytestream reader for Nifti Images using the io library. I dont know if that is even possible. I know that it is possible for JPEG images and is often done when deploying a model inference endpoint as is shown here.
Here is the relevant code snippet.

def input_fn(request_body, request_content_type):
    """
    The request_body is passed in by SageMaker and the content type is passed in 
    via an HTTP header by the client (or caller).
    """
    print("input_fn-----------------------")
    if request_content_type in ("application/x-image", "image/x-image"):
        image = Image.open(io.BytesIO(request_body)).convert("RGB")
        numpy_array = np.array(image)
        print("numpy_array.shape", numpy_array.shape)
        print("input_fn-----------------------")
        return [numpy_array], PredictMode.frame

I feel that US is more closer to a video stream, but I have not worked with ultrasound "images" before.

Holoscan SDK provides a built-in inference operator that supports streaming input/tensor (e.g. video). Given that MONAI Deploy App SDK is on HSDK, I'm inclined to say that it is feasible to expose the HSDK inference operator on the MD App SDK API (I intentionally excluded it in the current MD App SDK releases to avoid dragging in additional dependencies)

Hi @MMelQin, I think we talked about it one time. Because holoscan is very intentionally made for streaming. I think for images, realtime inference is not really a use case. I mean probably what @Nic-Ma meant is the ability to send images and receive the predicted image. Probably what he meant was a model server which can respond back to the query endpoint. Will clairify tomorrow in the meeting.