Exporting a trained model for inference

After your model has been trained, you should export it to a Tensorflow graph proto. A checkpoint will typically consist of three files:

model.ckpt-${CHECKPOINT_NUMBER}.data-00000-of-00001,
model.ckpt-${CHECKPOINT_NUMBER}.index
model.ckpt-${CHECKPOINT_NUMBER}.meta

After you've identified a candidate checkpoint to export, run the following command from tensorflow/models/research/object_detection:

# From tensorflow/models/research/
python object_detection/export_inference_graph.py \
    --input_type image_tensor \
    --pipeline_config_path ${PIPELINE_CONFIG_PATH} \
    --trained_checkpoint_prefix ${TRAIN_PATH} \
    --output_directory output_inference_graph.pb

Afterwards, you should see a graph named output_inference_graph.pb.