Blog

Brad Dwyer

Roboflow cofounder and CTO. Building the computer vision infrastructure for developers. Previously founded Hatchlings and created Product Hunt's AR App of the Year.

Latest Posts by Brad Dwyer

online shopping AI

18 Apr 2021 • 3 min read

Top 5 Ways Computer Vision Can Improve Online Shopping and Boost Revenue

SUMMARY Computer vision addresses several practical friction points in online retail by working directly with the product image libraries that ecommerce platforms already maintain. Visual search lets shoppers upload a photo and retrieve similar items without needing precise descriptive terms. Automated image classification and attribute tagging can process thousands of

transfer

11 Apr 2021 • 4 min read

How important is subject similarity for transfer learning?

SUMMARY An experiment comparing four transfer learning starting points on a mask-wearing detection dataset reveals that domain similarity matters more than pretraining scale. A checkpoint pretrained on WIDER Face (a face-focused dataset) outperformed the COCO-pretrained baseline despite COCO containing far more images and categories, while a blood-

Top 5 Ways Manufacturers Are Already Using Computer Vision

2 Apr 2021 • 3 min read

Top 5 Ways Manufacturers Are Already Using Computer Vision

SUMMARY Manufacturers are applying computer vision across five core operational areas: spotting equipment wear before it causes downtime (predictive maintenance), catching product defects including dimensional deviations too subtle for visual inspection, enforcing PPE and safety procedures on the floor, guiding accurate assembly of complex or delicate components, and automating barcode

Roboflow Changelog: April 2021

1 Apr 2021 • 1 min read

Roboflow Changelog: April 2021

Each month we bring you the high level bullet-points of improvements and additions to Roboflow. If you missed it, last month's changelog is here. In March we were focused on expanding Roboflow's inference capabilities with the release of on-device NVIDIA Jetson support, our open

How to Use Your Webcam with Roboflow Models

30 Mar 2021 • 4 min read

How to Use Your Webcam with Roboflow Models

Learn how to use your webcam with Roboflow computer vision models.

Zero-Shot Content Moderation with OpenAI's New CLIP Model

28 Mar 2021 • 6 min read

Zero-Shot Content Moderation with OpenAI's New CLIP Model

Learn how to use the CLIP zero-shot model to moderate visual content.

conference

27 Mar 2021 • 4 min read

Andrew Ng: "Deploying to production means you're halfway there."

SUMMARY Andrew Ng's core argument at the Scale Transform conference is that deploying a model to production is the midpoint, not the finish line: real-world performance requires a continuous feedback loop where data collected from deployment improves the next model version. He makes the case for a

Video Inference with Roboflow

22 Mar 2021 • 2 min read

Video Inference with Roboflow

SUMMARY Running a Roboflow model on video works by splitting the footage into individual frames, sending each frame through the model for predictions, then stitching the annotated frames back into a video. Roboflow provides an open source shell script that handles all three steps, so you can visualize detection output

Introducing Roboflow Support for NVIDIA Jetson

11 Mar 2021 • 3 min read

Introducing Roboflow Support for NVIDIA Jetson

SUMMARY Roboflow Inference supports the full NVIDIA Jetson family, letting teams deploy custom-trained computer vision models to edge devices using three Docker commands, with GPU acceleration enabled by default and speeds up to 15 frames per second on the Jetson Xavier NX. The on-device inference server maintains API

Roboflow Changelog: March 2021

5 Mar 2021 • 1 min read

Roboflow Changelog: March 2021

The monthly changelog showcases improvements in Roboflow over the past month. You can find the previous changelog here. In February, we had a major focus on reinforcing our foundation; after several months of rapid feature expansion we spent a considerable amount of time fixing bugs, improving infrastructure, and preparing for

TensorFlowJS

1 Mar 2021 • 8 min read

Running Tensorflow JS on a NVIDIA Jetson

SUMMARY Running TensorFlow.js on an NVIDIA Jetson requires extra steps because Google does not ship prebuilt arm64 binaries for the Node.js backend, but two practical paths exist: use the WebGL backend in Chromium for zero-configuration GPU acceleration at around 2 to 4 frames per second, or compile

Introducing Upload Batches, the Unannotated Queue, and Mark as Null

20 Feb 2021 • 3 min read

Introducing Upload Batches, the Unannotated Queue, and Mark as Null

SUMMARY Roboflow introduced three annotation workflow features to help teams manage iterative dataset collection: Upload Batches automatically groups each new image upload so teams can divide labeling work without merging separate datasets; the Unannotated Queue makes it easy to track exactly which images still need labels; and Mark as Null

Roboflow Changelog: February 2021

3 Feb 2021 • 2 min read

Roboflow Changelog: February 2021

Welcome to our monthly roundup post of new features and enhancements. You can find the previous changelog here. The biggest new features released this month were transfer learning and Label Assist. Roboflow Organize * Announced teams for all (now teams of up to 3 people can collaborate on the Starter Plan

Using Unity Perception to train an object detection model with synthetically generated images

26 Jan 2021 • 11 min read

Using Unity Perception to train an object detection model with synthetically generated images

SUMMARY Unity's Perception package can generate perfectly annotated synthetic images using only software, giving computer vision projects a way to bootstrap training data before real-world images are available. This tutorial walks through setting up Unity 2019.4 LTS with the Perception package, generating a labeled synthetic dataset,

Launch: Model Assisted Labeling

25 Jan 2021 • 2 min read

Launch: Model Assisted Labeling

SUMMARY Roboflow Label Assist cuts annotation time by using your already-trained Roboflow models to pre-populate bounding boxes on new images, so annotators spend time only correcting errors rather than drawing every label from scratch. Public model support starting with 80 Microsoft COCO classes is included free on the

Using the Upload API to Collect Images from the Wild

6 Jan 2021 • 3 min read

Using the Upload API to Collect Images from the Wild

SUMMARY Production computer vision models degrade without a feedback loop that continuously surfaces real-world edge cases. The Roboflow Upload API lets you pipe images directly from deployed applications into a Roboflow dataset, so failures users encounter in the field can be flagged, labeled, and folded back into the next

public

6 Jan 2021 • 4 min read

Using Public Datasets to Improve your Computer Vision Models

SUMMARY When a model is underperforming and more field collection is impractical, merging your dataset with publicly available annotated data is often the fastest way to improve accuracy. This post demonstrates the approach using COCO and OpenImages car images, where doubling the training set by adding 1,000 OpenImages examples

Roboflow Changelog: January 2021

3 Jan 2021 • 2 min read

Roboflow Changelog: January 2021

Welcome to our monthly changelog where we catalog our recent feature additions and improvements. If you missed it, you can find last month's changelog here. This month we launched Roboflow Annotate, an integrated image annotation tool included in all Roboflow plans. In the first few weeks, over 1500

Get a Hosted API for your Object Detection Model

28 Dec 2020 • 2 min read

Get a Hosted API for your Object Detection Model

SUMMARY After training a custom object detection model, the hardest part is often deploying it without managing servers that sit idle or buckle under load. Roboflow Infer addresses this by training a model on your labeled dataset and immediately exposing it as a hosted API that scales with demand, so

Introducing Roboflow Annotate

8 Dec 2020 • 2 min read

Introducing Roboflow Annotate

SUMMARY Roboflow Annotate is a self-serve image annotation tool built directly into the Roboflow platform, removing the friction of managing a separate labeling tool outside your pipeline. The integrated design supports team collaboration from a single source of truth and makes it straightforward to jump in and out of

Roboflow Changelog: December 2020

4 Dec 2020 • 1 min read

Roboflow Changelog: December 2020

Welcome to the first of our monthly changelogs, where we will be cataloging our recent feature additions and improvements. Roboflow Organize * Added ability to rebalance train/test split * Clarified pro plan features in-app * Sped up thumbnail generation * Added image upload by URL to the upload API * Paginated the image

engineering daily podcast

14 Oct 2020 • 31 min read

Software Engineering Daily Podcast

Roboflow co-founder Brad Dwyer was a guest on the Software Engineering Daily podcast. Listen on your favorite podcast app (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Stitcher), or see the full transcript below. ‎Software Engineering Daily: Roboflow: Computer Vision Models with Brad Dwyer on Apple PodcastsTraining a computer vision model is not

wildfires

12 Oct 2020 • 2 min read

Fighting Wildfires with Computer Vision

SUMMARY Abhishek Ghosh, a graduate student at Texas A&M working with AI For Mankind, trained an EfficientDet D0 computer vision model to detect early smoke from forest fires using images from weather towers. Using Roboflow Pro, he applied advanced augmentations and a static crop along the horizon line

Roboflow Wins $15,000 Award

6 Oct 2020 • 1 min read

Roboflow Wins $15,000 Award

Roboflow is honored to be named as one of Iowa's most promising startups and one of the top 3 winners of the Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Venture Competition. The annual awards honor companies with innovative technology that have grown quickly. Since launching in January, Roboflow has helped over 8,000

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