Roboflow Blog

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. Datasets are

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 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, and "things" it

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 contact

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

30 Mar 2021 • 4 min read

How to Use Your Webcam with Roboflow Models

Learn how to use your webcam with Roboflow computer vision models.

28 Mar 2021 • 6 min read

Zero-Shot Content Moderation with OpenAI's New CLIP Model

Learn how to use the CLIP zero-shot model to moderate visual content.

27 Mar 2021 • 3 min read

Andrew Ng: "Deploying to production means you're halfway there."

Andrew Ng, the co-founder of Google Brain and Coursera and former Chief Scientist at Baidu, spoke at this week's Scale Transform conference on the transition from "big data" to "good data." He relayed several insights learned from his efforts to deploy AI for real-world

24 Mar 2021 • 1 min read

Webinar: How to Build a Detectron2 Model with Roboflow and Paperspace Gradient

Missed the event or looking for the recording? Check out the Roboflow + Paperspace Detectron2 webinar recording here and notebook here! Tomorrow, Roboflow and Paperspace are co-hosting a webinar teaching you how to build a Detectron2 model with our tools. Roboflow gives you "everything you need to start building computer

22 Mar 2021 • 1 min read

Video Inference with Roboflow

One common question we get is "Can I use my Roboflow model on a video?" The answer is yes! Videos are really just a sequence of images, so your model can give predictions just like it does on images. The process is simple: 1) split your video into

21 Mar 2021 • 3 min read

Danger Monitoring for Cyclists using Raspberry Pi and Object Detection

This is a guest post authored by Herberto Warner and lightly edited by the Roboflow team. Herberto's Github hosts all of the images used in his project. Increasing numbers of dangers and accidents for cyclists Cyclists face dangers like cars on the street, other cyclists, and poorly developed

20 Mar 2021 • 4 min read

What Is Embedded Machine Learning?

Machine learning – the software discipline of mapping inputs to outputs without explicitly programmed relationships – requires substantial computational resources. Traditionally, this limits where machine learning models can run to very powerful supercomputers. But this is changing. Computation is required at two core moments in the machine learning development lifecycle: model training

15 Mar 2021 • 3 min read

Using Computer Vision to Detect Personal Protective Equipment

This is a guest post by data scientist Jaco Lau; this has been lightly edited by the Roboflow team. Having worked in construction, I constantly found myself reminding subcontractors to wear the proper Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). Wearing the proper PPE can save lives; from 2018 to 2019, construction injuries

14 Mar 2021 • 8 min read

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

Paint.wtf is an online game that uses AI to score user-submitted digital drawings to zany prompts like, "Draw a giraffe in the arctic" or "Draw a bumblebee loves capitalism." It's Cards Against Humanity meets Microsoft Paint. Paint.wtf became an internet sensation. In

11 Mar 2021 • 2 min read

Introducing Roboflow Support for NVIDIA Jetson

💡Roboflow Inference, which you can use to deploy computer vision models to a Jetson (among many other devices), is now available as an open source project. See the Quickstart to get started. Deploy Models to NVIDIA Embedded Devices Deploying models to the edge offers unique benefits: inference speeds can be

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

As part of Roboflow's new partnership with OpenCV, I had the opportunity to be involved with the first round of the 2021 OpenCV AI Competition. If you haven't heard of the competition, it's the world's biggest spatial AI competition, in which over

1 Mar 2021 • 8 min read

Running Tensorflow JS on a NVIDIA Jetson

The NVIDIA Jetson line is a series of AI-capable low-power computers. They range from the $59 Jetson Nano (2GB) to the $899 Jetson AGX Xavier and are a popular choice for powering machine learning projects on the edge. Tensorflow.js is a library for deploying machine learning in JavaScript; it