ZeroInference.Core 1.0.0

ZeroInference

ZeroInference is a pure C# ONNX deep learning inference engine and model runtime for .NET with zero external dependencies. It eliminates bulky native C++ runtime binaries (no ONNX Runtime native DLLs, no OpenVINO, no Python dependencies), reading and evaluating .onnx and .zeromodel neural graphs directly in memory with SIMD vectorization and int8 quantization.

🌟 Key Capabilities

• Zero Dependency Pure C# Runtime: No native shared libraries (onnxruntime.dll, libonnxruntime.so) required. Runs anywhere .NET runs.
• Direct ONNX Model Parser: Stack-allocated Protocol Buffers wire reader (ProtobufWireReader) parsing ONNX binary graphs directly into executable compute graphs.
• Compact .zeromodel Serialization: Fast binary serialization format with pre-compiled layer topologies and optimized weights layout.
• Supported Deep Learning Layers:
  • Conv2D (Direct & im2col GEMM convolution)
  • Dense / Gemm (Fully-connected linear layers)
  • BatchNormalization & LayerNorm
  • Activations (ReLU, LeakyReLU, Sigmoid, Tanh, Softmax)
  • Pooling (MaxPool2D, AveragePool2D, GlobalAveragePool)
  • Reshape, Flatten, Concat, Slice
• Quantization & Vision Post-Processing:
  • Int8 Quantizer: Symmetric and asymmetric integer quantization for edge devices.
  • Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS): Fast SIMD bounding box filtering with configurable IoU and score thresholds.
• Hardware Agnostic: Executes over ZeroTensor CPU SIMD or ZeroCompute Direct3D 11 GPU compute contexts.

📦 Installation

Install via the .NET CLI:

dotnet add package ZeroInference.Core

🚀 Quick Start

1. Parsing and Executing an ONNX Model

using ZeroInference.Core.Engine;
using ZeroInference.Core.Format;
using ZeroTensor.Core;

// 1. Load and parse .onnx model file
using var stream = File.OpenRead("models/classifier.onnx");
var graph = OnnxModelParser.Parse(stream);

// 2. Instantiate inference engine
var engine = new InferenceEngine(graph);

// 3. Prepare input tensor and infer
var input = Tensor.RandomUniform(1, 3, 224, 224);
var outputs = engine.Forward(input);

Console.WriteLine($"Inference Output Shape: [{outputs[0].Shape[0]}, {outputs[0].Shape[1]}]");

2. Fast Object Detection NMS Post-Processing

using ZeroInference.Core.Vision;

var candidateBoxes = new List<BoundingBox>
{
    new BoundingBox(10, 10, 50, 50, score: 0.92f, classId: 1),
    new BoundingBox(12, 11, 48, 52, score: 0.78f, classId: 1), // Overlapping duplicate
    new BoundingBox(100, 120, 60, 40, score: 0.85f, classId: 2)
};

// Filter duplicates with IoU threshold = 0.45
var filtered = NonMaximumSuppression.Filter(candidateBoxes, iouThreshold: 0.45f, scoreThreshold: 0.5f);

Console.WriteLine($"Remaining boxes after NMS: {filtered.Count}");

📊 Benchmark & Performance

Tested on MobileNet-V2 / ResNet-18 (Release x64):

📄 License

MIT License © 2026 Phong Võ. Part of the ZeroPlatform project.