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+# Flask REST API
+
+[REST](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer) [API](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API)s are
+commonly used to expose Machine Learning (ML)  models to other services. This folder contains an example REST API
+created using Flask to expose the YOLOv5s model from [PyTorch Hub](https://pytorch.org/hub/ultralytics_yolov5/).
+
+## Requirements
+
+[Flask](https://palletsprojects.com/p/flask/) is required. Install with:
+
+```shell
+$ pip install Flask
+```
+
+## Run
+
+After Flask installation run:
+
+```shell
+$ python3 restapi.py --port 5000
+```
+
+Then use [curl](https://curl.se/) to perform a request:
+
+```shell
+$ curl -X POST -F image=@zidane.jpg 'http://localhost:5000/v1/object-detection/yolov5s'
+```
+
+The model inference results are returned as a JSON response:
+
+```json
+[
+  {
+    "class": 0,
+    "confidence": 0.8900438547,
+    "height": 0.9318675399,
+    "name": "person",
+    "width": 0.3264600933,
+    "xcenter": 0.7438579798,
+    "ycenter": 0.5207948685
+  },
+  {
+    "class": 0,
+    "confidence": 0.8440024257,
+    "height": 0.7155083418,
+    "name": "person",
+    "width": 0.6546785235,
+    "xcenter": 0.427829951,
+    "ycenter": 0.6334488392
+  },
+  {
+    "class": 27,
+    "confidence": 0.3771208823,
+    "height": 0.3902671337,
+    "name": "tie",
+    "width": 0.0696444362,
+    "xcenter": 0.3675483763,
+    "ycenter": 0.7991207838
+  },
+  {
+    "class": 27,
+    "confidence": 0.3527112305,
+    "height": 0.1540903747,
+    "name": "tie",
+    "width": 0.0336618312,
+    "xcenter": 0.7814827561,
+    "ycenter": 0.5065554976
+  }
+]
+```
+
+An example python script to perform inference using [requests](https://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/) is given
+in `example_request.py`