Roboflow Blog

25 May 2021 • 7 min read

Roboflow Competitors and Alternatives

SUMMARY Roboflow positions itself as an end-to-end computer vision platform that covers upload, annotation, dataset management, training, and deployment under one roof, which it contrasts against building a custom in-house pipeline (typically over 10x higher total cost of ownership) and against narrower point solutions that handle only

24 May 2021 • 3 min read

What is a Cutout Augmentation and When Can it Help?

SUMMARY Cutout augmentation, introduced in the YOLOv4 paper, randomly masks a square region of a training image to force the model to use broader image context rather than relying on a single dominant feature. It is most useful when objects in your dataset overlap or occlude one another (such as

24 May 2021 • 3 min read

Why Roboflow Train?

SUMMARY Roboflow Train is a managed model training service that converts an annotated dataset into a production-ready computer vision model without requiring ML infrastructure expertise or a dedicated machine learning team. Key benefits include a battle-tested training pipeline that avoids subtle dependency misconfigurations, transfer learning from general checkpoints,

19 May 2021 • 6 min read

How Computer Vision Streamlines Risk Avoidance Workflows in Oil & Gas

SUMMARY In Canadian oil and gas operations, regulators require companies to identify and notify landowners whose property falls within a proposed pipeline's consultation area, a task that traditionally meant manually digitizing house locations one by one in ArcGIS. This guest post by Douglas Long describes replacing that manual

17 May 2021 • 4 min read

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

SUMMARY OpenAI's CLIP model performs zero-shot image classification by matching text prompts to image content, but the exact wording of each prompt has a significant effect on accuracy. This post walks through that sensitivity using a rock, paper, scissors hand-sign dataset, showing how prompts like "

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

SUMMARY Roboflow and Luxonis have partnered to let users train a custom computer vision model and deploy it to the OAK-1 or OAK-D via a Docker container, eliminating the manual steps of model format conversion to OpenVINO and dependency setup that previously caused silent accuracy regressions. After training

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

SUMMARY Image augmentation increases effective training set size by applying random transformations to existing images, but knowing how much to augment and which transforms to apply depends on your dataset. This experiment tests three variables across three public datasets of different sizes (26, 196, and 665 images of packages, raccoons,

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

21 Apr 2021 • 3 min read

Computer Vision is Shaking Up Brick-and-Mortar Retail

SUMMARY Computer vision is moving well beyond self-checkout lanes in brick-and-mortar retail. Retailers are deploying camera-based systems to automate shelf inventory auditing, flag depleted stock, recognize repeat customers for personalized promotions, monitor product interaction to inform merchandising decisions, and detect theft at point of sale. Each

18 Apr 2021 • 2 min read

Roboflow's new User Interface

SUMMARY Roboflow's redesigned interface reorganizes the end-to-end computer vision workflow around four clearer stages. Datasets are now called Projects to reflect that they hold images, annotations, versions, and models together. Upload and Annotate have dedicated spots in the sidebar, dataset version generation is now a sequential

18 Apr 2021 • 3 min read

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

SUMMARY Computer vision addresses several practical friction points in online retail by working directly with the product image libraries that ecommerce platforms already maintain. Visual search lets shoppers upload a photo and retrieve similar items without needing precise descriptive terms. Automated image classification and attribute tagging can process thousands of

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?

SUMMARY An experiment comparing four transfer learning starting points on a mask-wearing detection dataset reveals that domain similarity matters more than pretraining scale. A checkpoint pretrained on WIDER Face (a face-focused dataset) outperformed the COCO-pretrained baseline despite COCO containing far more images and categories, while a blood-

11 Apr 2021 • 3 min read

Our Favorite Computer Vision Courses

SUMMARY The right computer vision course depends heavily on what you want to build and how much you already know. This guide organizes recommendations by learner type: Andrew Ng's AI for Everyone for non-technical conceptual grounding, fast.ai and Roboflow's own tutorials for practitioners who

6 Apr 2021 • 3 min read

Using Computer Vision to Extract Document Structure

SUMMARY A student in Germany trained a custom object detection model on roughly 1,000 scanned school book pages to identify individual tasks and page numbers, reducing the data that needs to be transmitted during remote learning by sending extracted text instead of full images. The project used Roboflow Annotate

4 Apr 2021 • 7 min read

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

SUMMARY IBM shut down IBM Visual Recognition in 2021, leaving teams mid-project and needing a path forward. This post walks through two methods for exporting data out of IBM Visual Recognition and IBM Cloud Annotations, then compares what to look for in a replacement platform, covering annotation speed, active

2 Apr 2021 • 3 min read

Top 5 Ways Manufacturers Are Already Using Computer Vision

SUMMARY Manufacturers are applying computer vision across five core operational areas: spotting equipment wear before it causes downtime (predictive maintenance), catching product defects including dimensional deviations too subtle for visual inspection, enforcing PPE and safety procedures on the floor, guiding accurate assembly of complex or delicate components, and automating barcode

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

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.