This document covers how to install PaddleDetection, its dependencies (including PaddlePaddle), and COCO and PASCAL VOC dataset.
For general information about PaddleDetection, please see [README.md](../README.md).
## PaddlePaddle
Running PaddleDetection requires PaddelPaddle Fluid v.1.5 and later. please follow the installation instructions in [installation document](http://www.paddlepaddle.org/documentation/docs/en/1.4/beginners_guide/install/index_en.html).
Please make sure your PaddlePaddle installation was sucessful and the version of your PaddlePaddle is not lower than the version required. You can check PaddlePaddle installation with following commands.
```
# To check if PaddlePaddle installation was sucessful
PaddleDetection support train/eval/infer models with dataset [MSCOCO](http://cocodataset.org) and [PASCAL VOC](http://host.robots.ox.ac.uk/pascal/VOC/), you can set up dataset as follows.
**Create symlinks for datasets:**
Dataset default path in PaddleDetection config files is `data/coco` and `data/voc`, you can set symlinks for your COCO/COCO-like or VOC/VOC-like datasets with following commands:
```
ln -sf <path/to/coco> $PaddleDetection/data/coco
ln -sf <path/to/voc> $PaddleDetection/data/voc
```
If you do not have datasets locally, you can download dataset as follows:
If you set up models while `data/coc` and `data/voc` is not found, PaddleDetection will automaticaly download them from [MSCOCO-2017](http://images.cocodataset.org) and [VOC2012](http://host.robots.ox.ac.uk/pascal/VOC), the decompressed datasets will be places in `~/.cache/paddle/dataset/` and can be discovered automaticaly in the next setting up time.
**NOTE:** For further informations on the datasets, please see [DATASET.md](../ppdet/data/README.md)