How to optimize the inference part to get a faster prediction

I have written the following prediction code that predicts from a trained classifier model. Now the prediction time is around 40s which I want to reduce as much as possible.

import torch
import torch.nn as nn
from torchvision.models import resnet18
from torchvision.transforms import transforms
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
from torch.autograd import Variable
import torch.functional as F
from PIL import Image
import os
import sys
import argparse
import time 
import json

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description = 'To Predict from a trained model')

parser.add_argument('-i','--image', dest = 'image_name', required = True, help='Path to the image file')
args = parser.parse_args()

def predict_image(image_path):
    print("prediciton in progress")
    image = Image.open(image_path)

    transformation = transforms.Compose([
        transforms.RandomResizedCrop(224),
        transforms.ToTensor(),
        transforms.Normalize([0.485, 0.456, 0.406], [0.229, 0.224, 0.225])
        ])

    image_tensor = transformation(image).float()
    image_tensor = image_tensor.unsqueeze_(0)

    if cuda:
        image_tensor.cuda()

    input = Variable(image_tensor)
    output = model(input)

    index = output.data.numpy().argmax()
    return index

def parameters():
    hyp_param = open('param_predict.txt','r')
    param = {}
    for line in hyp_param:
        l = line.strip('\n').split(':')

def class_mapping(index):
    with open("class_mapping.json") as cm:
        data = json.load(cm)
    if index == -1:
        return len(data)
    else:
        return data[str(index)]

def segregate():
    with open("class_mapping.json") as cm:
        data = json.load(cm)
	try:
	    os.mkdir(seg_dir)
	    print("Directory " , seg_dir ,  " Created ") 
	except OSError:
	    print("Directory " , seg_dir ,  " already created")
	for x in range (0,len(data)):
		dir_path="./"+seg_dir+"/"+data[str(x)]
		try:
			os.mkdir(dir_path)
			print("Directory " , dir_path ,  " Created ") 
		except OSError:
			print("Directory " , dir_path ,  " already created")


path_to_model = "./models/"+'trained.model'
checkpoint = torch.load(path_to_model)
seg_dir="segregation_folder"

cuda = torch.cuda.is_available()

num_class = class_mapping(index=-1)
print num_class
model = resnet18(num_classes = num_class)

if cuda:
	model.load_state_dict(checkpoint)
else:
	model.load_state_dict(checkpoint, map_location = 'cpu')

model.eval()

if __name__ == "__main__":

    imagepath = "./Predict_Image/"+args.image_name
    since = time.time()
    img = Image.open(imagepath)
    prediction = predict_image(imagepath)
    name = class_mapping(prediction)
    print("Time taken = ",time.time()-since)
   
    print("Predicted Class: ",name)

The entire project can be found at

Any help is appriciated.