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

computer vision for street murals

15 Nov 2020 • 4 min read

Bringing Street Murals to Life with Computer Vision

In Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn (BedStuy), Yuri Fukuda regularly walks by a mural that showcases prominent female leaders. Since October 2005, a stunning 3,300 square foot mural, When Women Pursue Justice by ArtMakers-NYC, has had a central place in the BedStuy art scene. The mural celebrates 90 women who have

Hands on with the Roboflow Infer Web Application Interface Builder

8 Nov 2020 • 3 min read

Hands on with the Roboflow Infer Web Application Interface Builder

After you train a model with Roboflow Train, you're provided with three immediate ways to use your model: a curl command, the direct URL, and an Example Web App. In this post, we'll demonstrate hands on how to use the web application (as well as how

Evaluating Object Detection Models with mAP by Class

3 Nov 2020 • 3 min read

Evaluating Object Detection Models with mAP by Class

When evaluating an object detection model in computer vision, mean average precision is the most commonly cited metric for assessing performance. Remember, mean average precision is a measure of our model's ability to correctly predict bounding boxes at some confidence level – commonly mAP@0.5 or mAP@0.

How to Use the Detectron2 Model Zoo (for Object Detection)

1 Nov 2020 • 2 min read

How to Use the Detectron2 Model Zoo (for Object Detection)

Detectron2 is Facebook's open source library for implementing state-of-the-art computer vision techniques in PyTorch. Facebook introduced Detectron2 in October 2019 as a complete rewrite of Detectron (which was implemented in Caffe). Facebook uses Detectron2 in a wide array of their products, including Portal, and notes the framework accelerates

protect endangered species

30 Oct 2020 • 5 min read

How This Fulbright Scholar is Using Computer Vision to Protect Endangered Species

The below post is by Kasim Rafiq, a conservationist, Fulbright Scholar, and National Geographic Explorer studying at UC Santa Cruz. Kasim holds a PhD in Wildlife Ecology from Liverpool John Moores University. Introduction Nature underpins everything. From our global economy to our wellbeing and survival. Everything relies on nature. Unfortunately,

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. The post is also available on David's blog.

tesla

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 to improving plant health, machine vision is enabling us to create more accurate diagnoses, cures, and research methods. Mateo Sokac is advancing progress in cancer research with object detection. Mateo is a Danish-based researcher at Aarhus University concurrently

Introducing Grayscale and Hue/Saturation Augmentations

27 Sep 2020 • 3 min read

Introducing Grayscale and Hue/Saturation Augmentations

Roboflow 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 improves model performance,

data science

12 Sep 2020 • 1 min read

Elisha Odemakinde Hosts Roboflow for a Fireside Chat

Recently, Roboflow machine learning engineer Jacob Solawetz 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 language processing to

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 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 can quickly become a sprawling mess. We're introducing improved detailed image previews that enable our

Cocoparks 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

Y Combinator

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?) every minute*. Making sense of that sea of video content creates valuable opportunities. For brands, knowing when and where they're being mentioned means identifying their share-of-voice, marketing to

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

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

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 YOLO i.e. YOLOv5, to

computer vision software for human rights

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)

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 where players accumulate points across multiple hands. The first player

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 to their problems, we were making our own computer vision applications. One of those applications, Magic Sudoku, even won Product Hunt's Augmented Reality App of the Year.

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