Roboflow Blog

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.

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 • 4 min read

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

SUMMARY Andrew Ng's core argument at the Scale Transform conference is that deploying a model to production is the midpoint, not the finish line: real-world performance requires a continuous feedback loop where data collected from deployment improves the next model version. He makes the case for a

24 Mar 2021 • 1 min read

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

SUMMARY This post announces and links the recording for a joint Roboflow and Paperspace webinar that walks through training a Detectron2 object detection model on a blood cell count dataset. The session covers accessing public image datasets through Roboflow, applying preprocessing and augmentation, and running GPU-backed training notebooks on

22 Mar 2021 • 2 min read

Video Inference with Roboflow

SUMMARY Running a Roboflow model on video works by splitting the footage into individual frames, sending each frame through the model for predictions, then stitching the annotated frames back into a video. Roboflow provides an open source shell script that handles all three steps, so you can visualize detection output

21 Mar 2021 • 4 min read

Danger Monitoring for Cyclists using Raspberry Pi and Object Detection

SUMMARY This project builds a low-cost cyclist danger monitor using a Raspberry Pi 4, a Google Coral TPU stick for faster inference, and an LED traffic light that warns the rider when cars or bicycles are detected in proximity. The model was trained on three datasets totaling over 6,

20 Mar 2021 • 4 min read

What Is Embedded Machine Learning?

SUMMARY Embedded machine learning is the practice of running inference directly on microcontrollers and low-power hardware, such as a Raspberry Pi, NVIDIA Jetson, or Luxonis OAK, rather than sending data to a cloud server. Shrinking model sizes and cheaper, faster hardware have made this practical: inference requires far fewer

15 Mar 2021 • 3 min read

Using Computer Vision to Detect Personal Protective Equipment

SUMMARY Construction site PPE compliance can be automated with an object detection model that flags safety violations, such as missing hard hats, directly from site images. Data scientist Jaco Lau built this using Roboflow for image annotation, class balancing, and model training, then deployed the detector inside a Streamlit application

14 Mar 2021 • 9 min read

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

SUMMARY Paint.wtf is an online drawing game built by Roboflow and Booste that uses OpenAI's CLIP model to score user submissions against absurdist text prompts, ranking drawings by how closely their image embeddings match the prompt's text embedding. GPT-2 generated the bulk of the

11 Mar 2021 • 3 min read

Introducing Roboflow Support for NVIDIA Jetson

SUMMARY Roboflow Inference supports the full NVIDIA Jetson family, letting teams deploy custom-trained computer vision models to edge devices using three Docker commands, with GPU acceleration enabled by default and speeds up to 15 frames per second on the Jetson Xavier NX. The on-device inference server maintains API

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

SUMMARY Reviewing over 200 project proposals submitted to the 2021 OpenCV AI Competition, five application patterns stand out across the more than 1,200 competing teams: assisting the visually impaired with spatial awareness, improving workplace safety by identifying hazardous zones, monitoring COVID protocol compliance, and tracking animal health and conservation

1 Mar 2021 • 8 min read

Running Tensorflow JS on a NVIDIA Jetson

SUMMARY Running TensorFlow.js on an NVIDIA Jetson requires extra steps because Google does not ship prebuilt arm64 binaries for the Node.js backend, but two practical paths exist: use the WebGL backend in Chromium for zero-configuration GPU acceleration at around 2 to 4 frames per second, or compile

23 Feb 2021 • 8 min read

How to Use Roboflow and Streamlit to Visualize Object Detection Output

SUMMARY This tutorial builds a blood cell detection app that trains an object detection model in Roboflow to identify platelets, red blood cells, and white blood cells, then wraps the model's API in a Streamlit interface so users can upload images, adjust confidence thresholds with a slider, and

22 Feb 2021 • 3 min read

How to Use Google Earth Engine and Python API to Export Images to Roboflow

SUMMARY Google Earth Engine's Python API can pull multispectral imagery from the Sentinel-2 satellite and export it as image files ready to upload directly into Roboflow for training computer vision models on geographic data. The tutorial covers authenticating to both Google Earth Engine and Google Drive, selecting

20 Feb 2021 • 3 min read

Introducing Upload Batches, the Unannotated Queue, and Mark as Null

SUMMARY Roboflow introduced three annotation workflow features to help teams manage iterative dataset collection: Upload Batches automatically groups each new image upload so teams can divide labeling work without merging separate datasets; the Unannotated Queue makes it easy to track exactly which images still need labels; and Mark as Null

15 Feb 2021 • 3 min read

Using Computer Vision to Improve Disability Access in Music Education

SUMMARY A high school student built the Mehek Box, a tactile rhythm education tool for students with disabilities, and extended it with a computer vision feature that recognizes physical rhythm blocks via an in-app camera. She trained an EfficientDet-D0 object detection model on a custom dataset built from

8 Feb 2021 • 4 min read

Using Computer Vision to Help Win $1 Million in Mountain Dew's Big Game Contest

SUMMARY Mountain Dew's Super Bowl LV ad challenged viewers to count the exact number of bottles in the commercial for a $1 million prize, and this post builds an object detection model to assist with that count. The 30-second video was sampled at three frames per second

8 Feb 2021 • 7 min read

How to Train and Deploy a License Plate Detector to the Luxonis OAK

In this post, we will leverage Roboflow and the Luxonis OAK to train and deploy a custom license plate model to your OAK device.