Roboflow Blog

27 Jun 2021 • 1 min read

Announcing Classification Support for Roboflow Annotate

When it launched in early 2020, Roboflow was primarily a tool for converting object detection datasets. As the months have gone on we have expanded its capabilities to include collaboration, training, deployment, and annotation. We have supported uploading, augmenting, and converting classification datasets for models like OpenAI's CLIP

21 Jun 2021 • 3 min read

What Is the JAX Deep Learning Framework?

You've probably heard of TensorFlow and PyTorch, and maybe you've even heard of MXNet - but there is a new kid on the block of machine learning frameworks - Google's JAX.

20 Jun 2021 • 5 min read

For the People, By the People

Computer vision, on the whole, is an ambitious undertaking. We are developing technology that can see the world as we see it - to recognize simple objects like trees and croissants, and more complex occurrences like oil and methane leaks. Today, models can even read license plates and receipts. Computer

16 Jun 2021 • 3 min read

The Joys of Sharing Models on OpenCV's Modelplace

If we could all get together and share our model creation and deployments, that would be a very good thing for the computer vision community. Modelplace is a big step in that direction.

14 Jun 2021 • 6 min read

How to Train MobileNetV2 On a Custom Dataset

In this post, we will walk through how you can train MobileNetV2 to recognize image classification data for your custom use case.

14 Jun 2021 • 7 min read

Building vs. Buying a Computer Vision Platform

“You could do what Roboflow does yourself but…why would you?” -Jack Clark, Co-Founder of Anthropic, former Policy Directory at OpenAI, It’s no secret that building a computer vision model on your own is hard work. It requires wrangling together different platforms, open-source tools, and developer notebooks to create

13 Jun 2021 • 4 min read

How to Train with Microsoft Azure Custom Vision and Roboflow

Roboflow is a tool for building robust machine learning operations pipelines for computer vision: from collecting and organizing images, annotating, training, deploying, and creating active learning pipelines to rapidly create improved model performance. When it comes to the training step, developers should optimize for ease. Roboflow Train enables teams to

6 Jun 2021 • 6 min read

How to Train the Hugging Face Vision Transformer On a Custom Dataset

Learn how to train a Hugging Face Vision Transformer on a custom dataset for classification.

2 Jun 2021 • 1 min read

Roboflow Changelog: June 2021

Each month, we publish a list of recent features and additions to the Roboflow suite of products. The previous month's update is here. In May there has been a bevy of backend changes to support a huge user-facing release coming next month. The most noticeable updates this month

30 May 2021 • 5 min read

What Does "End to End" Really Mean?

Developing, deploying and optimizing computer vision models used to be a cumbersome, painful process. With Roboflow, we sought to democratize this technology, which (first and foremost) meant knocking down the barriers that we perceived were preventing everyday people from exploring and implementing computer vision in their work and daily lives.

27 May 2021 • 6 min read

License Plate Detection and OCR on an NVIDIA Jetson

In this blog, we discuss how to train and deploy a custom license plate detection model to the NVIDIA Jetson. While we focus on the detection of license plates in particular, this guide also provides an end-to-end guide on deploying custom computer vision models to your NVIDIA Jetson on the edge.

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 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 * When you should use cutout

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, 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 can overlap with private landowner property.

17 May 2021 • 4 min read

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

Featuring rock, paper, scissors. OpenAI's CLIP model (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 about the content of images without

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. As a part of our partnership

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

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, we've come in first place on the Pioneer leaderboard for a record-breaking 25-weeks in a row, we publish at least five pieces of content each week (check out our blog