Whisper pipeline on NPU does not shutdown cleanly

[kmaki565]

Following the sample code, I can run inference of Whisper on NPU (Intel AI Boost) of my ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 12.

Although I am satisfied with the speed (much faster than one on CPU!) and output quality, I noticed the console turn to red after inference is finished.

This symptom occurs both with the Python and C++ samples if NPU is targeted when creating pipeline.

I set a breakpoint in WinDbg for the cpp sample to capture the point when the C++ exe writes something to console, then found an ANSI escape sequence ESC[31m was sent right before the program exited.

To know which function sends the escape sequence, I compiled the OpenVINO binaries with RelWithDebInfo and place the binaries to the same folder as the C++ sample. Then output was like this:

Note this time the console was properly reset after a log message was output as red. I am suspecting that when the original issue occurred, the pipeline wasn't properly destructed and the program exited before the whole error log message was output to console.

I can workaround this issue by calling the destructor of the WhisperPipeline explicitly before exiting main but wonder if there are more graceful ways.

Questions are:

• What does the error message indicate?
• Can the library be updated to handle the cleanup gracefully or should the programmer need to care?

Thanks for your support and the great libraries!

[kmaki565]

I noticed the above code change could cause application crash at the exit timing. I can't workaround the issue as of now.