Latest Posts

15 Mar 2021 • 3 min read

Using Computer Vision to Detect Personal Protective Equipment

SUMMARY Construction site PPE compliance can be automated with an object detection model that flags safety violations, such as missing hard hats, directly from site images. Data scientist Jaco Lau built this using Roboflow for image annotation, class balancing, and model training, then deployed the detector inside a Streamlit application

14 Mar 2021 • 9 min read

How We Built Paint.wtf, an AI Game with 150,000+ Submissions that Judges Your Art

SUMMARY Paint.wtf is an online drawing game built by Roboflow and Booste that uses OpenAI's CLIP model to score user submissions against absurdist text prompts, ranking drawings by how closely their image embeddings match the prompt's text embedding. GPT-2 generated the bulk of the

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

8 Mar 2021 • 3 min read

3 Things You Should Know From This Year's 2021 Startup Summit

Last week, I attended the 2021 Startup Summit from my home office in Des Moines, Iowa. Perhaps one of the few good things to come out of this pandemic are virtual conferences, which have significantly increased the accessibility of thought leadership in our respective industries. Read about some of the

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

1 Mar 2021 • 3 min read

5 Emerging Trends in Computer Vision Applications from OpenCV's AI Competition

SUMMARY Reviewing over 200 project proposals submitted to the 2021 OpenCV AI Competition, five application patterns stand out across the more than 1,200 competing teams: assisting the visually impaired with spatial awareness, improving workplace safety by identifying hazardous zones, monitoring COVID protocol compliance, and tracking animal health and conservation

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

23 Feb 2021 • 8 min read

How to Use Roboflow and Streamlit to Visualize Object Detection Output

SUMMARY This tutorial builds a blood cell detection app that trains an object detection model in Roboflow to identify platelets, red blood cells, and white blood cells, then wraps the model's API in a Streamlit interface so users can upload images, adjust confidence thresholds with a slider, and

22 Feb 2021 • 3 min read

How to Use Google Earth Engine and Python API to Export Images to Roboflow

SUMMARY Google Earth Engine's Python API can pull multispectral imagery from the Sentinel-2 satellite and export it as image files ready to upload directly into Roboflow for training computer vision models on geographic data. The tutorial covers authenticating to both Google Earth Engine and Google Drive, selecting

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

15 Feb 2021 • 3 min read

Using Computer Vision to Improve Disability Access in Music Education

SUMMARY A high school student built the Mehek Box, a tactile rhythm education tool for students with disabilities, and extended it with a computer vision feature that recognizes physical rhythm blocks via an in-app camera. She trained an EfficientDet-D0 object detection model on a custom dataset built from

8 Feb 2021 • 4 min read

Using Computer Vision to Help Win $1 Million in Mountain Dew's Big Game Contest

SUMMARY Mountain Dew's Super Bowl LV ad challenged viewers to count the exact number of bottles in the commercial for a $1 million prize, and this post builds an object detection model to assist with that count. The 30-second video was sampled at three frames per second

8 Feb 2021 • 7 min read

How to Train and Deploy a License Plate Detector to the Luxonis OAK

In this post, we will leverage Roboflow and the Luxonis OAK to train and deploy a custom license plate model to your OAK device.

8 Feb 2021 • 4 min read

Using Computer Vision to Make Card Grading Faster and Cheaper

SUMMARY Professional card grading is slow and expensive, and a large portion of the assessment (edge wear, corner wear, centering, surface damage) maps well to computer vision. This guest post describes a prototype that uses OpenCV for edge detection and card alignment checks, then trains a YOLOv5 model on a

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

31 Jan 2021 • 3 min read

Using Computer Vision to Win at Duck Hunt

Can we use object detection to automate identifying moving objects on a screen? Abhinav Mandava leverages Roboflow to create an aimbot (which automates aiming and firing for the player) for Duck Hunt.

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,

25 Jan 2021 • 3 min read

Computer Vision Use Cases in Healthcare and Medicine

The FDA has authorized 1,524 AI-enabled medical devices, and the market for vision in healthcare is growing 24% a year. Here are 9 ways hospitals use computer vision today, from pill counting to cancer screening, with tutorials to build each one.

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

17 Jan 2021 • 2 min read

Teams for All: Create Free Teams on Roboflow

SUMMARY Roboflow now offers free teams, letting groups of three or fewer collaborate on datasets, annotation, and model deployment within a single shared workspace using individual API keys per account. Team members can share any dataset they own, annotate images together, and manage uploads and inference without sharing credentials. Larger

13 Jan 2021 • 4 min read

A Primer on Transfer Learning

SUMMARY Transfer learning lets you apply weights a model learned on one problem to a related problem, cutting training time and reducing the labeled data you need to get started. In practice this means initializing from a model already trained on a large dataset like COCO or ImageNet, then fine-

12 Jan 2021 • 2 min read

Announcing Roboflow’s Seed Round

Computer vision is a generational technology. Like the PC, internet, and mobile phones, computer vision’s impact will reshape every industry. In transportation, for example, the advent of machine vision gives rise to self-driving cars, rewiring how we navigate the world around us. Manufacturing companies are finding and reducing

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

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