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

Train Test Split Guide and Overview

28 Oct 2020 • 2 min read

Train Test Split Guide and Overview

In order to ensure our models are generalizing well (rather than memorizing training data), it is best practice to create a train, test split. That is, absent rigor, our models can easily overfit to a small subset of examples we've collected. Look no further than Tesla using computer

How to Save and Load Model Weights in Google Colab

25 Oct 2020 • 5 min read

How to Save and Load Model Weights in Google Colab

Google Colab is Google's hosted Jupyter Notebook product that provides a free compute environment, including GPU and TPU. Colab comes "batteries included" with many popular Python packages installed, making it a choice tool for easy model experimentation. For this reason, the Roboflow Model Library includes many

Using Computer Vision to Help Deaf and Hard of Hearing Communities

19 Oct 2020 • 9 min read

Using Computer Vision to Help Deaf and Hard of Hearing Communities

The below post is a lightly edited guest post by David Lee, a data scientist using computer vision to boost tech accessibility for communities that need it. David has open sourced all materials related to this project on his GitHub [https://github.com/insigh1/GA_Data_Science_Capstone]. The post

How Tesla Teaches Cars to Stop

11 Oct 2020 • 6 min read

How Tesla Teaches Cars to Stop

Creating successful computer vision models requires handling an ever growing set of edge cases. At the 2020 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Tesla's Senior Director of AI, Andrej Karpathy, gave a talk on how Tesla is building autonomous vehicles. Karpathy's team is responsible

Improving Cancer Research with Computer Vision

4 Oct 2020 • 3 min read

Improving Cancer Research with Computer Vision

Computer vision is improving life sciences. From the early identification of cancer [https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/01/google-healths-ai-identifies-breast-cancer-in-mammogram-imagery-with-fewer-false-positives/] to improving plant health [https://public.roboflow.com/object-detection/plantdoc], machine vision is enabling us to create more accurate diagnoses, cures, and research methods. Mateo Sokac is advancing progress in cancer

Introducing Grayscale and Hue/Saturation Augmentations

27 Sep 2020 • 3 min read

Introducing Grayscale and Hue/Saturation Augmentations

Roboflow [https://roboflow.com] is constantly improving how developers can build better computer vision models based on better input data. One key piece to this puzzle is enabling users to select augmentations that best improve dataset representation through augmentation. Augmentation creates altered training data based on existing examples. Image augmentation

Elisha Odemakinde Hosts Roboflow for a Fireside Chat

12 Sep 2020 • 1 min read

Elisha Odemakinde Hosts Roboflow for a Fireside Chat

Recently, Roboflow machine learning engineer Jacob Solawetz [http://jacobsolawetz.com] sat down with Elisha Odemakinde, an ML researcher and Community Manager at Data Science Nigeria, for a Fireside chat. During the conversation, Jacob walks through his journey from his career in financial trading to artificial intelligence, a move from natural

Explore Images, Annotations, and Metadata Easier

2 Sep 2020 • 2 min read

Explore Images, Annotations, and Metadata Easier

Keeping track of images and their corresponding annotations [https://blog.roboflow.com/glossary/#:~:text=annotation] is a challenge. Knowing which annotations map to which class, viewing image metadata, and seeing which images correspond to a training, validation, and testing set [https://blog.roboflow.com/train-test-split/] can quickly become a sprawling

How Cocoparks Accelerated Their Development with Roboflow

29 Aug 2020 • 1 min read

How Cocoparks Accelerated Their Development with Roboflow

Cocoparks, a Paris based startup working on improving traffic flows across French cities, launched their service months faster with Roboflow. "Before Google Maps, you could find routes to your destination using a map. There are many routes to try. But with Google Maps, it becomes seamless. This is what

Roboflow Joins Y Combinator's Summer 20 Batch

25 Aug 2020 • 2 min read

Roboflow Joins Y Combinator's Summer 20 Batch

Roboflow is enabling any developer to use computer vision (without being a machine learning expert). Computer vision is the first technology that fundamentally allows us to rewrite human-computer interaction. Until now, when using computers to interact with the world, humans would assess their environment, provide commands to a computer, and

Using Computer Vision to Count Fish Populations (and Monitor Environmental Health)

23 Aug 2020 • 7 min read

Using Computer Vision to Count Fish Populations (and Monitor Environmental Health)

The below is a guest post from Jamie Shaffer, a data scientist based in Washington state. She is open to new opportunities, particularly leveraging deep learning to environmental issues. Living in the Pacific Northwest, the intertwined issues of salmon survival and river flow are frequently in the news, and the

16 Aug 2020 • 3 min read

Using Computer Vision to Find Brands in YouTube Videos

Over 500 hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube (speaking of which.. have you subscribed to our channel yet? [https://www.youtube.com/c/Roboflow/?sub_confirmation=1]) every minute* [https://www.tubefilter.com/2019/05/07/number-hours-video-uploaded-to-youtube-per-minute/] . Making sense of that sea of video content creates valuable opportunities.

Reducing Traffic with Computer Vision

4 Aug 2020 • 3 min read

Reducing Traffic with Computer Vision

How Transport for Cairo is Improving Commuting for Millions with Computer Vision Reducing traffic in well-planned cities where bus routes are well-mapped, subways are running on a predictable cadence, and lanes are well-marked is a significant undertaking. Now consider improving traffic without predictable routes, maps, and regular modes of transit.

PP-YOLO Surpasses YOLOv4 - State of the Art Object Detection Techniques

3 Aug 2020 • 7 min read

PP-YOLO Surpasses YOLOv4 - State of the Art Object Detection Techniques

Baidu publishes PP-YOLO and pushes the state of the art in object detection research by building on top of YOLOv3, the PaddlePaddle deep learning framework, and cutting edge computer vision research.

Improving Infrastructure Asset Management with Computer Vision

21 Jul 2020 • 6 min read

Improving Infrastructure Asset Management with Computer Vision

The below post is a lightly edited guest post from Result! Data, a Netherlands-based consultancy providing leading digital services. The Roboflow team thanks Gerard Mol (Managing Partner) and Brand Hop (Chief Data Science) for their contributions. View their original post on detecting road signs with computer vision. Introduction Result! Data

Retail Store Item Detection using YOLOv5

18 Jul 2020 • 9 min read

Retail Store Item Detection using YOLOv5

This is a lightly edited guest post by Roboflow user Shayan Ali Bhatti, who used Roboflow to train an object detection model to identify items in grocery stores. Reposted with permission. Original content here. In this article, I present an application of the latest version of popular deep learning algorithm

How AI Acts as a Human Rights Watchdog for the Maasai People

1 Jul 2020 • 3 min read

How AI Acts as a Human Rights Watchdog for the Maasai People

The Maasai are an indigenous ethnic group in modern Kenya and northern Tanzania, tracing routes to the Great Rift Valley in East Africa as early as the 15th century. Roughly two million Maasai people retain rich cultural traditions, including leading a semi-nomadic life and subsisting predominantly on their cattle, which

Improving Uno with Computer Vision (Plus the Dataset so You Can Too)

28 Jun 2020 • 6 min read

Improving Uno with Computer Vision (Plus the Dataset so You Can Too)

Uno card identification and scoring in real-time. (Credit: Adam Crawshaw)You've likely been playing Uno wrong all of your life. It's a simple game, right? Rid your hand of all your cards first, and you're the victor. In fact, Uno is a multi-stage game

Creating BoardBoss: A Mobile Application that Improves Boggle

25 Jun 2020 • 6 min read

Creating BoardBoss: A Mobile Application that Improves Boggle

How Making an iOS Application Inspired Roboflow Before the Roboflow team was making tools for improving how developers apply computer vision [https://roboflow.com] to their problems, we were making our own computer vision applications. One of those applications, Magic Sudoku [https://magicsudoku.com], even won Product Hunt's

How to Convert Annotations from PASCAL VOC to YOLO Darknet

19 Jun 2020 • 5 min read

How to Convert Annotations from PASCAL VOC to YOLO Darknet

A bedrock of computer vision is having labeled data. In object detection [https://blog.roboflow.com/object-detection/] problems, those labels define bounding box positions in a given image. As computer vision rapidly evolves, so, too, do the various file formats available to describe the location of bounding boxes: PASCAL VOC

Responding to the Controversy about YOLOv5

12 Jun 2020 • 16 min read

Responding to the Controversy about YOLOv5

We appreciate the machine learning community's feedback, and we're publishing additional details on our methodology. (Note: On June 14, we've incorporated updates from YOLOv4 author Alexey Bochkovskiy, YOLOv5 author Glenn Jocher, and others in the community.) Don't care about the controversy? Skip

YOLOv5 is Here: State-of-the-Art Object Detection at 140 FPS

10 Jun 2020 • 4 min read

YOLOv5 is Here: State-of-the-Art Object Detection at 140 FPS

Less than 50 days after the release YOLOv4, YOLOv5 improves accessibility for realtime object detection. June 29, YOLOv5 has released the first official version of the repository. We wrote a new deep dive on YOLOv5. June 12, 8:08 AM CDT Update: In response to to community feedback, we have

How to Train a YOLOv5 Model On a Custom Dataset

10 Jun 2020 • 10 min read

How to Train a YOLOv5 Model On a Custom Dataset

Learn how to train a YOLOv5 model on a custom dataset.

Teaching a Drone to Fly on Auto Pilot with Roboflow

3 Jun 2020 • 3 min read

Teaching a Drone to Fly on Auto Pilot with Roboflow

An animated drone flying through a correctly identified gate. (Image provided via Victor Antony, animated by Roboflow)Drones are enabling better disaster response, greener agriculture, safer construction, and so much more [https://www.cbinsights.com/research/drone-impact-society-uav/]. Increasingly, drones are even achieving the ability to perform these tasks completely or

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