Roboflow Blog

12 Oct 2020 • 1 min read

Fighting Wildfires with Computer Vision

Abhishek Ghosh is training a computer vision model to detect the first signs of smoke from a forest fire with the ultimate hope of dispatching a drone to douse it with water before it gets out of control. It's all part of a project he's working

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

6 Oct 2020 • 1 min read

Roboflow Wins $15,000 Award

Roboflow is honored to be named as one of Iowa's most promising startups and one of the top 3 winners of the Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Venture Competition. The annual awards honor companies with innovative technology that have grown quickly. Since launching in January, Roboflow has helped over 8,000

5 Oct 2020 • 23 min read

Glossary of Common Computer Vision Terms

Computer Vision (and Machine Learning in general) is one of those fields that can seem hard to approach because there are so many industry-specific words (or common words used in novel ways) that it can feel a bit like you're trying to learn a new language when you're trying to get started.

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

2 Oct 2020 • 4 min read

What is a Label Map?

In this post, we will demystify the label map by discussing the role that it plays in the computer vision annotation process. Then we will get hands on with some real life examples using a label map.

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,

25 Sep 2020 • 3 min read

Getting Started with VGG Image Annotator for Object Detection Tutorial

Annotating your images is easy using the free, open source VGG Image Annotator. In this post we will walk through the steps necessary to get up and running with the VGG Image Annotator so you can quickly, and efficiently label your computer vision dataset for object detection and move on

22 Sep 2020 • 3 min read

Training Robots to Identify Other Robots

Amitabha Banerjee used YOLOv5 and Roboflow to teach his Anki Vector robot to detect other robots. This is not only a fun project to teach machine learning but it could have real world implications as well. In the future, we'll want our robots to be able to collaborate

18 Sep 2020 • 5 min read

How to Build Computer Vision Models with Apple CreateML

What is CreateML? CreateML is a machine learning tool developed by Apple that you can use to build models that work with images, sound, text, and more. CreateML integrates with the rest of the Apple ecosystem, providing a no-code platform through which you can train models for use in your

14 Sep 2020 • 2 min read

What is an annotation group?

If you're wondering this, you're not alone. The annotation group is the category that encompasses all of the classes in your dataset. It answers the question "What kind of things are labeled in this dataset?" Why do you need an annotation group? It'

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 • 3 min read

Deploy YOLOv5 to Jetson Xavier NX at 30FPS

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

4 Sep 2020 • 6 min read

Train, Validation, Test Split for Machine Learning

At Roboflow, we often get asked, what is the train, validation, test split and why do I need it? The motivation is quite simple: you should separate you data into train, validation, and test splits to prevent your model from overfitting and to accurately evaluate your model.

3 Sep 2020 • 7 min read

Use Resnet34 for Image Classification

Can a computer tell the difference between a dandelion and a daisy? In this post we put these philosophical musings aside, and dive into the the code necessary to find the answer. We walk through the steps necessary to train a custom image classification model from the Resnet34 backbone using

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

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

28 Aug 2020 • 4 min read

Fast.ai v2 Released - What's New?

Fastai, the popular deep learning framework and MOOC releases fastai v2 with new improvements to the fastai library, a new online machine learning course, and new helper repositories. In this post, we will dive into what is new in fastai v2 and why you should check it out! What is

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

24 Aug 2020 • 1 min read

Video: How to Use Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels with Roboflow

Recently, we co-hosted a webinar with Mark McQuade of Onica, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, about using Roboflow along with AWS Rekognition Custom Labels to train and deploy a custom object detection model. In the video, we learn how to go end-to-end to train a custom mask / no mask detector.

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

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

17 Aug 2020 • 5 min read

How to Train a Custom TensorFlow Lite Object Detection Model

Learn how to train a custom TensorFlow Lite object detection model with a custom dataset.