Roboflow Blog

25 May 2021 • 7 min read

Roboflow Competitors and Alternatives

We think it's important for users to make a fully informed decision, so we're committed to maintaining a comparison between our software and our competitors' so you can make the best purchasing decision for your business. Where does Roboflow fit in? Roboflow is an end-to-end

24 May 2021 • 3 min read

What is a Cutout Augmentation and When Can it Help?

Applying data augmentations [https://blog.roboflow.com/boosting-image-detection-performance-with-data-augmentation/]is one of the most essential steps when developing your dataset. Roboflow offers a wide variety of augmentations that you can apply to your dataset including an augmentation called the cutout augmentation. In this blog you will learn: * What cutout augmentations are

24 May 2021 • 3 min read

Why Roboflow Train?

If deployment is the magic of computer vision, then the act of training a model is the proverbial wave of that wand. Training a computer vision model is the process by which a computer learns to detect specific objects within images - put simply (and more elegantly), it’s how

19 May 2021 • 6 min read

How Computer Vision Streamlines Risk Avoidance Workflows in Oil & Gas

The below is a guest post by Douglas Long [https://www.linkedin.com/in/doug-long-yyc/], a full stack developer in Calgary, Canada. Douglas previously worked in oil and gas. In the oil and gas industry, providing advanced notification for the development of energy infrastructure is a regulatory requirement. New pipelines

17 May 2021 • 4 min read

Prompt Engineering: The Magic Words to using OpenAI's CLIP

Featuring rock, paper, scissors. OpenAI's CLIP model [https://models.roboflow.com/classification/clip] (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training) is a powerful zero-shot classifier that leverages knowledge of the English language to classify images without having to be trained on any specific dataset. In other words, CLIP already knows a lot

14 May 2021 • 10 min read

License Plate Detection and OCR using Roboflow Inference API

In this post, we’ll walk you through creating a license plate detection and OCR model using Roboflow that you can programmatically use for your own projects.

11 May 2021 • 4 min read

PP-YOLO Strikes Again - Record Object Detection at 68.9FPS

Object detection research is white hot! In the last year alone, we've seen the state of the art reached by YOLOv4, YOLOv5, PP-YOLO, and Scaled-YOLOv4. And now Baidu releases PP-YOLOv2, setting new heights in the object detection space.

5 May 2021 • 8 min read

How to Train and Deploy Custom Models to Your OAK

In this blog, we'll walk through the Roboflow custom model deployment process to the OAK and show just how seamless it can be.

5 May 2021 • 3 min read

Partnering with Luxonis and OpenCV for Seamless Deployment to OpenCV AI Kit

Deploying computer vision models to the edge is critical to unlocking new use cases like in places with limited internet connectivity or where minimal latency is essential. That might be deploying to a rural field in agriculture or computer vision in high throughput manufacturing [https://blog.roboflow.com/computer-vision-use-cases-for-manufacturing/]. As

4 May 2021 • 1 min read

Roboflow Changelog: May 2021

The changelog is our compendium of monthly updates. If you want to take a walk down memory lane, you can being your trip back in time with last month's edition. In April, our major product efforts centered around launching our brand new user interface. This redesign of our

3 May 2021 • 8 min read

The power of image augmentation: an experiment

One of the amazing things about computer vision is using existing images plus random changes to increase your effective sample size. Suppose you have one photo containing a coffee mug. Then, copy that photo and rotate it 10 degrees clockwise. From your point of view, you haven’t done very

27 Apr 2021 • 2 min read

Using videos as training data

Oftentimes, the visual data you'll want to analyze will come in the form of video. It may be security camera footage [https://roboflow.com/industries/safety-and-security], YouTube videos [https://blog.roboflow.com/using-computer-vision-to-find-brands-in-youtube-videos/], or webcam recordings [https://blog.roboflow.com/python-webcam/]. We know how to use Roboflow with

26 Apr 2021 • 3 min read

Image Augmentations for Aerial Datasets

Learn how to apply image augmentations to aerial datasets for use in training computer vision models.

25 Apr 2021 • 6 min read

How We at Roboflow Do Remote Work

We'd like to think we've worked remotely pretty successfully: we raised a seed round [https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/12/roboflow-raises-2-1m-for-its-end-to-end-computer-vision-platform/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAALHkxHU44NN7l8ao6JPMA1tPtxbqgUuaDArSLdQvJxehHTVzYkFUN7EouPCZqORG-VxhR7KHw4BfZSYWKF076uZxnzL2OunWuEAaA-w8oCOjbVGl2iQTmiQfYhD9fI8h6DzWwJtjexpNAJm4TezFrY0rI5YeMhcTOniUX4xZIPNA] , we've come in first place on the Pioneer leaderboard [htt

21 Apr 2021 • 3 min read

Computer Vision is Shaking Up Brick-and-Mortar Retail

Computer vision is changing the landscape of retail storefronts. While it’s most often experienced in places like self-checkout lines, innovative retailers have realized the potential that computer vision can offer them by rolling it out to other functions within their stores. The largest retail companies on the bleeding edge

18 Apr 2021 • 1 min read

Roboflow's new User Interface

When you log into your Roboflow account you'll notice a fresh look, but the features you know and love are all still just a click away. We've reorganized the app to make things easier to find, simpler to navigate, and primed for future enhancement. Video overview

18 Apr 2021 • 3 min read

Top 5 Ways Computer Vision Can Improve Online Shopping and Boost Revenue

Few things are as natural a fit as ecommerce and computer vision. With the bulk of online retail experiences being built on quality image data uploaded by both storefronts and customers, computer vision has the power to use all of that data to elevate the online shopping experience. Ecommerce marketplaces

18 Apr 2021 • 3 min read

How to Use Computer Vision to Keep Stock of Inventory

Learn how to use computer vision to track inventory in logistics facilities.

11 Apr 2021 • 4 min read

How important is subject similarity for transfer learning?

Using transfer learning [https://blog.roboflow.com/a-primer-on-transfer-learning/] to initialize your computer vision model from pre-trained weights rather than starting from scratch (initializing randomly) has been shown to increase performance and decrease training time. It makes sense, by giving your model prior knowledge about basic concepts like lines, curves, textures,

11 Apr 2021 • 3 min read

Our Favorite Computer Vision Courses

A question we frequently receive at Roboflow is, "What is the best class for learning computer vision?" Like most questions, the answer does depend on your background and what you're aiming to learn. Below, we've compiled a few of our favorite courses for learning

6 Apr 2021 • 2 min read

Using Computer Vision to Extract Document Structure

This is a guest post written by Frederik Brammer, a student in Germany. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, working from home has become more important than ever. Because of homeschooling, school servers have crashed due to the enormous amount of traffic – in some cases, multiple days go by without

4 Apr 2021 • 6 min read

How to Use Roboflow with IBM Visual Recognition (IBM Watson vs Roboflow)

IBM recently announced they are shutting down IBM Visual Inspection, their product for creating custom computer vision models for classification and object detection. No new instances can be created and all current instances will be fully shutdown in December 2021. This has left many looking for IBM Visual Inspection alternatives.

2 Apr 2021 • 3 min read

Top 5 Ways Manufacturers Are Already Using Computer Vision

Computer vision has become essential to building strong and stable manufacturing processes for operations of all sizes, and manufacturers across every industry are using the technology to boost the productivity and quality of their production lines. What was once reserved for only the largest manufacturers to invest time and money

1 Apr 2021 • 1 min read

Roboflow Changelog: April 2021

Each month we bring you the high level bullet-points of improvements and additions to Roboflow. If you missed it, last month's changelog is here. In March we were focused on expanding Roboflow's inference capabilities with the release of on-device NVIDIA Jetson support, our open source video