Roboflow Blog

4 Oct 2020 • 3 min read

Improving Cancer Research with Computer Vision

SUMMARY Researcher Mateo Sokac at Aarhus University is using object detection to identify neutrophils in dry microscopy images, with the goal of accelerating cancer research in humans. Starting from 127 labeled images, augmentation via Roboflow expanded the dataset to 451 samples and lifted mean average precision to 0.70, a

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

SUMMARY Roboflow has added three color-based augmentation options, grayscale, hue, and saturation, to help models generalize to objects that appear under different lighting conditions or in varied color environments. Grayscale augmentation randomly converts a configurable percentage of training images to single-channel output, reducing the model's reliance

25 Sep 2020 • 4 min read

Getting Started with VGG Image Annotator for Object Detection Tutorial

SUMMARY VGG Image Annotator (VIA) is a free, browser-based labeling tool built by Oxford University researchers that supports bounding box and polygon annotations for object detection datasets. This tutorial covers the full workflow: creating a project, loading images, drawing annotations, assigning class labels, and exporting data, then converting the

22 Sep 2020 • 3 min read

Training Robots to Identify Other Robots

SUMMARY Amitabha Banerjee trained a computer vision model to teach his Anki Vector robot to detect other robots, addressing a real gap since the Vector's onboard AI handles speech and human recognition but not robot-to-robot identification. He collected 303 images from the robot's own

18 Sep 2020 • 5 min read

How to Build Computer Vision Models with Apple CreateML

SUMMARY Apple CreateML provides a no-code interface for training image classification and object detection models that deploy as CoreML files directly into iOS and macOS apps, but its proprietary JSON annotation format is not widely supported by standard labeling tools. This tutorial uses Roboflow as the format converter: label

14 Sep 2020 • 2 min read

What is an annotation group?

SUMMARY An annotation group is the top-level category that describes what kinds of objects are labeled in a dataset, sitting above individual class names. The concept matters because the same image can be labeled multiple ways for different models, and Roboflow uses annotation groups to merge datasets, share images

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 • 4 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

SUMMARY This tutorial walks through training a custom image classification model on the ResNet34 backbone using the fastai library and PyTorch, starting from an ImageNet pretrained checkpoint and fine-tuning it on a new dataset via transfer learning. The post uses a public flower classification dataset as a worked example,

2 Sep 2020 • 2 min read

Explore Images, Annotations, and Metadata Easier

SUMMARY Roboflow's updated image preview interface lets users view annotations full-screen, toggle individual annotation groups on and off by hovering, and surface image metadata including the original filename, camera used, modification date, and which split the image belongs to. For dataset versions with augmentations applied, the preview

29 Aug 2020 • 2 min read

How Cocoparks Accelerated Their Development with Roboflow

SUMMARY Cocoparks, a Paris-based startup building parking and traffic-flow intelligence for French cities, shipped a working computer vision model in 30 days by using Roboflow to handle data preparation, augmentation, and format conversion. Mixing and matching image examples, applying augmentations that lifted model accuracy by 2 percent, and

28 Aug 2020 • 4 min read

Fast.ai v2 Released - What's New?

SUMMARY Fastai v2 brings a restructured three-layer API built on PyTorch, making it practical to move between computer vision and NLP tasks with minimal code changes. Key additions include a flexible infinite training loop, GPU-accelerated per-batch augmentation, and companion libraries (fastcore, fastscript, fastgpu) that extend Python and

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,

24 Aug 2020 • 1 min read

Video: How to Use Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels with Roboflow

SUMMARY This webinar recording from Roboflow and AWS Premier Consulting Partner Onica covers the full pipeline for training and deploying a custom mask detection model using Roboflow for dataset preparation and AWS Rekognition Custom Labels for training and hosting. The session goes end to end from raw images to a

23 Aug 2020 • 8 min read

Using Computer Vision to Count Fish Populations (and Monitor Environmental Health)

SUMMARY Counting salmon passing through a fish ladder viewing window is currently done by trained human observers, but object detection models can automate and scale that work. Data scientist Jamie Shaffer trained a computer vision model on fish ladder footage, reaching a meaningful mAP@0.5 on a dataset where

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.

16 Aug 2020 • 4 min read

Using Computer Vision to Find Brands in YouTube Videos

SUMMARY Software engineer Charles Herring built a browser-based computer vision model that detects power tool brands appearing in DIY YouTube videos, giving companies a way to measure unpaid exposure and identify sponsorship opportunities. Roboflow replaced Google Cloud AutoML as his data management layer, providing dataset-level class distribution statistics

12 Aug 2020 • 14 min read

Deploy A Custom Model to the Luxonis OAK - A Quickstart Guide

This guide will take you the long distance from unlabeled images to a working computer vision model deployed and inferencing live at 15FPS on the affordable and scalable Luxonis OpenCV AI Kit (OAK) device.

4 Aug 2020 • 3 min read

Reducing Traffic with Computer Vision

SUMMARY Transport for Cairo used computer vision to count and classify vehicles, including taxis, tuk tuks, microbuses, and motorcycles, at intersections in a Ugandan city where no prior traffic data existed, replacing a costly manual volunteer counting approach. The team used Roboflow to manage image data, apply augmentations for underrepresented

3 Aug 2020 • 8 min read

PP-YOLO Surpasses YOLOv4 - State of the Art Object Detection Techniques

Baidu publishes PP-YOLO and pushes the state of the art in object detection research by building on top of YOLOv3, the PaddlePaddle deep learning framework, and cutting edge computer vision research.