Profiler

The EdgeFirst Profiler is the on-target measurement engine for the EdgeFirst Studio platform. It runs the complete vision pipeline — capture, preprocess, inference, postprocess, NMS — on the hardware your model will deploy to, then publishes per-image predictions and a detailed timing trace to EdgeFirst Studio where accuracy metrics, charts, and trace visualizations are produced.

For public benchmarks, explore the EdgeFirst Model Zoo on Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/spaces/EdgeFirst/Models. We publish public benchmarks and metrics there across Ultralytics and other community models so you can compare your validation results against known baselines.

EdgeFirst Profiler — F4 dashboard during a validation run

What it is

edgefirst-profiler is a native binary that runs on each supported target. It owns everything that has to happen next to the silicon: model loading, accelerated decode, pipeline orchestration, and the inference call itself. It uses edgefirst-hal under the hood for hardware-accelerated decode and pre/post-processing, drives every backend through a unified interface, and inherits the EdgeFirst DMA optimizations across the pipeline.

The result is a small, portable, high-performance on-target tool. Adding a new device to the EdgeFirst ecosystem only requires landing the profiler on that platform — the same CLI and workflow plug straight into the existing Studio-side metrics, charts, and reports.

How it fits together

flowchart LR
    A[edgefirst-profiler<br/>on target] -->|predictions.parquet<br/>trace.pftrace| B[EdgeFirst Studio]
    B -->|mAP / mIoU<br/>charts, trace viewer| D[You]

The profiler measures and publishes. EdgeFirst Studio receives the artifacts and produces the accuracy charts, the per-operator timing visualizations, and the comparison views. The same v-XXXX validation-session ID links the on-target run to everything Studio shows afterwards.

What you can do with the profiler

The profiler is always operated against an EdgeFirst Studio session. There are two equivalent entry points:

• Validation from Studio — create a user-managed validation session in the Studio web UI, then run the profiler against that session ID on your target.
• Validation from the Profiler — browse training sessions inside the profiler's TUI and let the profiler create the validation session in place.

Both paths produce the same artifacts and the same Studio session card.

Platform Video Demos

These demos show EdgeFirst Profiler runs on common deployment and development targets.

MacBook

NXP i.MX 95

NXP Ara240

Read next

• Quick Start — install the profiler, sign in to Studio, run your first validation session in under fifteen minutes.
• Installation — supported targets, per-target dependencies, and target-specific quirks.
• EdgeFirst Studio Integration — connecting to Studio, validation from Studio, and validation from the profiler.
• Pipelining — the multi-stage measurement pipeline, the --inference-depth flag, and how each backend constrains it. (Concepts deep-dive.)