Latest Posts

27 Sep 2020 • 3 min read

Introducing Grayscale and Hue/Saturation Augmentations

SUMMARY Roboflow has added three color-based augmentation options, grayscale, hue, and saturation, to help models generalize to objects that appear under different lighting conditions or in varied color environments. Grayscale augmentation randomly converts a configurable percentage of training images to single-channel output, reducing the model's reliance

22 Sep 2020 • 3 min read

Training Robots to Identify Other Robots

SUMMARY Amitabha Banerjee trained a computer vision model to teach his Anki Vector robot to detect other robots, addressing a real gap since the Vector's onboard AI handles speech and human recognition but not robot-to-robot identification. He collected 303 images from the robot's own

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

10 Sep 2020 • 4 min read

Deploy YOLOv5 to Jetson Xavier NX at 30FPS

Learn how to deploy a YOLOv5 model to a Jetson Xavier NX edge device.

3 Sep 2020 • 7 min read

Use Resnet34 for Image Classification

SUMMARY This tutorial walks through training a custom image classification model on the ResNet34 backbone using the fastai library and PyTorch, starting from an ImageNet pretrained checkpoint and fine-tuning it on a new dataset via transfer learning. The post uses a public flower classification dataset as a worked example,

2 Sep 2020 • 2 min read

Explore Images, Annotations, and Metadata Easier

SUMMARY Roboflow's updated image preview interface lets users view annotations full-screen, toggle individual annotation groups on and off by hovering, and surface image metadata including the original filename, camera used, modification date, and which split the image belongs to. For dataset versions with augmentations applied, the preview

28 Aug 2020 • 4 min read

Fast.ai v2 Released - What's New?

SUMMARY Fastai v2 brings a restructured three-layer API built on PyTorch, making it practical to move between computer vision and NLP tasks with minimal code changes. Key additions include a flexible infinite training loop, GPU-accelerated per-batch augmentation, and companion libraries (fastcore, fastscript, fastgpu) that extend Python and

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,

24 Aug 2020 • 1 min read

Video: How to Use Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels with Roboflow

SUMMARY This webinar recording from Roboflow and AWS Premier Consulting Partner Onica covers the full pipeline for training and deploying a custom mask detection model using Roboflow for dataset preparation and AWS Rekognition Custom Labels for training and hosting. The session goes end to end from raw images to a

22 Aug 2020 • 8 min read

How to Train a Custom Mobile Object Detection Model (with YOLOv4 Tiny and TensorFlow Lite)

Learn how to train a custom mobile object detection model with YOLOv4 tiny and TensorFlow Lite.

21 Aug 2020 • 3 min read

The crazy story of how we got our .com domain

For almost a year, Roboflow (our computer vision dataset management tool) has lived at roboflow.ai. It's served us well but we have always lusted after the dot com. No longer! We managed to acquire roboflow.com from the giant German company that owned it since 2001. The

16 Aug 2020 • 4 min read

Using Computer Vision to Find Brands in YouTube Videos

SUMMARY Software engineer Charles Herring built a browser-based computer vision model that detects power tool brands appearing in DIY YouTube videos, giving companies a way to measure unpaid exposure and identify sponsorship opportunities. Roboflow replaced Google Cloud AutoML as his data management layer, providing dataset-level class distribution statistics

12 Aug 2020 • 14 min read

Deploy A Custom Model to the Luxonis OAK - A Quickstart Guide

This guide will take you the long distance from unlabeled images to a working computer vision model deployed and inferencing live at 15FPS on the affordable and scalable Luxonis OpenCV AI Kit (OAK) device.

3 Aug 2020 • 8 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.

3 Aug 2020 • 5 min read

Ontology Management for Computer Vision

SUMMARY Choosing class names at the start of a computer vision project and then needing to change them later is one of the most time-consuming parts of iterating on a dataset. This post covers practical ontology management strategies: labeling at the most specific level possible so classes can be

29 Jul 2020 • 2 min read

Advanced Augmentations in Roboflow

SUMMARY Roboflow added two augmentations to its platform, Mosaic and Cutout, that were central to accuracy gains in recent detection model research. Mosaic combines four training images into one, simulating random crops, mixing classes that rarely appear together, and varying object counts per image. Cutout overlays randomly placed black boxes

28 Jul 2020 • 14 min read

Benchmarking the Major Cloud Vision AutoML Tools

Until now, there has been little independent research published on the performance of AutoML tools - (both relative to each other and against state of the art open source models)

23 Jul 2020 • 1 min read

Roboflow can now ingest video!

SUMMARY Roboflow now accepts video file uploads directly, removing the manual step of extracting frames with command-line tools. Users select a sample rate to pull a subset of frames from the video, then annotate those frames using Roboflow's integrated labeling tools or by outsourcing the job in

21 Jul 2020 • 6 min read

Improving Infrastructure Asset Management with Computer Vision

SUMMARY Result! Data built a mobile app called Spobber that uses computer vision to detect hectometre signs along Dutch highways, verifying whether field assets match database records and flagging missing or damaged signs automatically. This guest post walks through their full pipeline: data collection from a moving vehicle, annotation, augmentation

18 Jul 2020 • 9 min read

Retail Store Item Detection using YOLOv5

SUMMARY This tutorial trains a YOLOv5 model on the SKU110k dataset to detect and localize products on retail store shelves, with dataset preparation handled through Roboflow and model training run in Google Colab. The resulting detector draws bounding boxes around shelf items and can support inventory tracking or automated checkout

16 Jul 2020 • 9 min read

How to Train a TensorFlow 2 Object Detection Model

Learn how to train a TensorFlow 2 object detection model on a custom dataset.

14 Jul 2020 • 3 min read

The TensorFlow 2 Object Detection Library is Here

SUMMARY The TensorFlow 2 Object Detection API brings EfficientDet models, eager execution, and improved training distribution strategies into the TensorFlow ecosystem, making it substantially easier to build and export custom object detection models. Roboflow's integration with the TF2 OD library lets developers point the data import step at

10 Jul 2020 • 5 min read

Convert Supervisely Annotations in Two Minutes

SUMMARY This guide walks through exporting an annotated dataset from Supervisely and converting its custom JSON format to YOLO Darknet format for use outside the Supervisely platform. The process involves downloading a tar archive of images and per-image annotation files, parsing the bounding box coordinates from Supervisely's

7 Jul 2020 • 4 min read

Introducing Class Label Remapping and Omission

With Roboflow Pro, you can now remap and omit class labels within Roboflow as a preprocessing step for your dataset version. Class management is a powerful tool to get the most out of your training data and your hard earned class label annotations.