Blog

Joseph Nelson

Roboflow cofounder and CEO. On a mission to transform every industry by democratizing computer vision. Previously founded and sold a machine learning company.

Latest Posts by Joseph Nelson

Missing vs. Null Annotations in Computer Vision Datasets

11 Jun 2026 • 10 min read

The Difference Between Missing and Null Annotations

Learn the difference between missing versus null annotations, including how they are represented in VOC XML and COCO JSON formats, and how their misidentification can be addressed using Roboflow tools to improve dataset quality.

When to Use Contrast as a Preprocessing Step

15 Jan 2026 • 6 min read

When to Use Contrast as a Preprocessing Step

See how contrast preprocessing improves edge detection and boosts model accuracy.

What is YOLO? The Ultimate Guide

14 Jan 2026 • 10 min read

What is YOLO? The Ultimate Guide

Learn about the history of the YOLO family of objec tdetection models, extensively used across a wide range of object detection tasks.

Computer vision labeling best practices to improve your dataset

5 Jan 2026 • 7 min read

How to Label Image Data for Computer Vision Models

This guide discusses what image labeling is and how to effectively label images for use in training computer vision models.

how to resize images without distortion

5 Jan 2026 • 6 min read

You Might Be Resizing Your Images Incorrectly

Resizing images incorrectly can distort objects and degrade model performance. Learn how to resize images without distortion: aspect ratios, padding strategies, and practical tips to ensure your models learn from clean, consistent visuals.

Convert Annotations from PASCAL VOC XML to COCO JSON with Roboflow

13 Nov 2025 • 10 min read

How to Convert Annotations from PASCAL VOC XML to COCO JSON

Convert from VOC XML to COCO JSON (or any format) in four clicks.

When to use grayscale preprocessing in computer vision

12 Nov 2025 • 3 min read

When to Use Grayscale as a Preprocessing Step

Grayscale allows our models to be more computationally efficient. So when **shouldn't** we grayscale our images?

What Is Image Preprocessing and Augmentation?

12 Nov 2025 • 9 min read

What Is Image Preprocessing and Augmentation?

Understanding image preprocessing and augmentation options is essential to making the most of your training data.

What is NVIDIA CUDA?

31 Aug 2025 • 14 min read

What Is NVIDIA CUDA? The GPU Language Powering Modern Computer Vision

CUDA is the engine behind modern computer vision. Learn what it is, how it works, and why nearly every AI breakthrough relies on it.

Advancing State of the Art Object Detection (Again) with RF-DETR

24 Jul 2025 • 6 min read

Advancing State of the Art Object Detection (Again) with RF-DETR

Learn how to use and train the three new state-of-the-art RF-DETR object detection model sizes.

RF-DETR: A SOTA Real-Time Object Detection Model By Roboflow

20 Mar 2025 • 8 min read

RF-DETR: A SOTA Real-Time Object Detection Model By Roboflow

Today we are releasing RF-DETR, a state-of-the-art real-time object detection model. Learn more about how RF-DETR works and how to use the model.

We Raised $40M to Invest In Enterprise and Open Source Vision AI

19 Nov 2024 • 4 min read

We Raised $40M to Invest In Enterprise and Open Source Vision AI

At Roboflow, our mission is to make the world programmable. We’ve raised an additional $40 million to continue building the open source tools, platform, and community so developers and enterprises can deploy computer vision applications to production.

What is Active Learning? The Ultimate Guide.

1 Sep 2024 • 11 min read

What is Active Learning? The Ultimate Guide.

In this guide, we discuss what active learning is, types of active learning, and walk through an example of active learning in practice.

opencv

27 Aug 2024 • 2 min read

Roboflow and OpenCV Partner to Advance Computer Vision Capabilities for All Developers

As a part of our joint partnership, Roboflow and OpenCV create educational blogs, webinars, and courses together.

What is YOLOv6? The Ultimate Guide.

4 Jan 2024 • 7 min read

What is YOLOv6? The Ultimate Guide.

In this guide, we discuss what YOLOv6 is, how the model works, and the architectural improvements made in YOLOv6 over its predecessors.

How We Work Together at Roboflow

11 Aug 2023 • 8 min read

How We Work Together at Roboflow

Roboflow is pioneering distributed work as a way of working together remotely. In this post, we discuss what distributed work is and how it helps our team collaborate.

How to Build a Semantic Image Search Engine with Supabase and OpenAI CLIP

17 Jul 2023 • 5 min read

How to Build a Semantic Image Search Engine with Supabase and OpenAI CLIP

SUMMARY OpenAI's CLIP model encodes both images and text into a shared embedding space, making it possible to search an image library with a plain text query and get back visually and semantically relevant results. This tutorial builds that system by calling the CLIP model through Roboflow'

Speculating on How GPT-4 Changes Computer Vision

16 Mar 2023 • 10 min read

Speculating on How GPT-4 Changes Computer Vision

OpenAI released GPT-4 showcasing strong multi-modal general AI capabilities in addition to impressive logical reasoning capability. Are general models going to obviate the need to label images and train models?

📸 Roboflow 100: A Multi-Domain Object Detection Benchmark

28 Nov 2022 • 6 min read

📸 Roboflow 100: A Multi-Domain Object Detection Benchmark

Roboflow 100 (RF100) is a crowdsourced object detection benchmark. The dataset consists of 100 datasets, 7 imagery domains, 224,714 images, and 829 class labels with over 11,170 labeling hours.

How to Train a YOLOv6 Model on a Custom Dataset

1 Jul 2022 • 16 min read

How to Train a YOLOv6 Model on a Custom Dataset

Learn how to train a YOLOv6 object detection model on a custom dataset.

How to Deploy Computer Vision Models: Best Practices

2 Apr 2022 • 10 min read

How to Deploy Computer Vision Models: Best Practices

In this guide, we walk through the fundamentals of deploying vision models and the questions you should evaluate when deciding how to deploy a model.

Let's Talk About Company Culture

20 Oct 2021 • 6 min read

Let's Talk About Company Culture

Company culture is a feeling in the air, the social norms of a group, the manifestation of collective goals and beliefs, and the one intangible thing that can make or break a growth stage company. For some, culture becomes a priority too late in the business. It starts to become

What is PaddlePaddle?

22 Sep 2021 • 1 min read

What is PaddlePaddle?

SUMMARY PaddlePaddle (PArallel Distributed Deep LEarning) is Baidu's open-source deep learning framework, comparable in scope to PyTorch and TensorFlow, providing the core primitives needed to build and train deep learning models. It gained attention in computer vision through PP-YOLO, a model in the YOLO family that

What is PyTorch?

20 Sep 2021 • 1 min read

What is PyTorch?

SUMMARY PyTorch is Facebook's open-source machine learning framework, originally popularized in academic research and now widely used in production systems. It provides the foundational building blocks for deep learning across computer vision, natural language processing, and audio, and serves as the base for higher-level frameworks like

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