Roboflow Blog

8 Feb 2021 • 4 min read

Using Computer Vision to Make Card Grading Faster and Cheaper

SUMMARY Professional card grading is slow and expensive, and a large portion of the assessment (edge wear, corner wear, centering, surface damage) maps well to computer vision. This guest post describes a prototype that uses OpenCV for edge detection and card alignment checks, then trains a YOLOv5 model on a

3 Feb 2021 • 2 min read

Roboflow Changelog: February 2021

Welcome to our monthly roundup post of new features and enhancements. You can find the previous changelog here. The biggest new features released this month were transfer learning and Label Assist. Roboflow Organize * Announced teams for all (now teams of up to 3 people can collaborate on the Starter Plan

31 Jan 2021 • 3 min read

Using Computer Vision to Win at Duck Hunt

Can we use object detection to automate identifying moving objects on a screen? Abhinav Mandava leverages Roboflow to create an aimbot (which automates aiming and firing for the player) for Duck Hunt.

26 Jan 2021 • 11 min read

Using Unity Perception to train an object detection model with synthetically generated images

SUMMARY Unity's Perception package can generate perfectly annotated synthetic images using only software, giving computer vision projects a way to bootstrap training data before real-world images are available. This tutorial walks through setting up Unity 2019.4 LTS with the Perception package, generating a labeled synthetic dataset,

25 Jan 2021 • 3 min read

Computer Vision Use Cases in Healthcare and Medicine

The FDA has authorized 1,524 AI-enabled medical devices, and the market for vision in healthcare is growing 24% a year. Here are 9 ways hospitals use computer vision today, from pill counting to cancer screening, with tutorials to build each one.

25 Jan 2021 • 2 min read

Launch: Model Assisted Labeling

SUMMARY Roboflow Label Assist cuts annotation time by using your already-trained Roboflow models to pre-populate bounding boxes on new images, so annotators spend time only correcting errors rather than drawing every label from scratch. Public model support starting with 80 Microsoft COCO classes is included free on the

17 Jan 2021 • 2 min read

Teams for All: Create Free Teams on Roboflow

SUMMARY Roboflow now offers free teams, letting groups of three or fewer collaborate on datasets, annotation, and model deployment within a single shared workspace using individual API keys per account. Team members can share any dataset they own, annotate images together, and manage uploads and inference without sharing credentials. Larger

13 Jan 2021 • 4 min read

A Primer on Transfer Learning

SUMMARY Transfer learning lets you apply weights a model learned on one problem to a related problem, cutting training time and reducing the labeled data you need to get started. In practice this means initializing from a model already trained on a large dataset like COCO or ImageNet, then fine-

12 Jan 2021 • 2 min read

Announcing Roboflow’s Seed Round

Computer vision is a generational technology. Like the PC, internet, and mobile phones, computer vision’s impact will reshape every industry. In transportation, for example, the advent of machine vision gives rise to self-driving cars, rewiring how we navigate the world around us. Manufacturing companies are finding and reducing

6 Jan 2021 • 3 min read

Using the Upload API to Collect Images from the Wild

SUMMARY Production computer vision models degrade without a feedback loop that continuously surfaces real-world edge cases. The Roboflow Upload API lets you pipe images directly from deployed applications into a Roboflow dataset, so failures users encounter in the field can be flagged, labeled, and folded back into the next

6 Jan 2021 • 4 min read

Using Public Datasets to Improve your Computer Vision Models

SUMMARY When a model is underperforming and more field collection is impractical, merging your dataset with publicly available annotated data is often the fastest way to improve accuracy. This post demonstrates the approach using COCO and OpenImages car images, where doubling the training set by adding 1,000 OpenImages examples

4 Jan 2021 • 2 min read

Introducing the Object Count Histogram

We are excited to announce the introduction of object count histograms, now available in the Roboflow dataset health check.

3 Jan 2021 • 2 min read

Roboflow Changelog: January 2021

Welcome to our monthly changelog where we catalog our recent feature additions and improvements. If you missed it, you can find last month's changelog here. This month we launched Roboflow Annotate, an integrated image annotation tool included in all Roboflow plans. In the first few weeks, over 1500

28 Dec 2020 • 6 min read

Football, Kaggle, Roboflow: Using Computer Vision to Tackle Helmet Safety

SUMMARY This post walks through a Kaggle competition case study focused on detecting American football helmet impacts to help researchers understand conditions that contribute to traumatic brain injury. The authors use Scaled-YOLOv4, selected for its inference speed, and use Roboflow to preprocess and augment the provided training images. A

28 Dec 2020 • 2 min read

Get a Hosted API for your Object Detection Model

SUMMARY After training a custom object detection model, the hardest part is often deploying it without managing servers that sit idle or buckle under load. Roboflow Infer addresses this by training a model on your labeled dataset and immediately exposing it as a hosted API that scales with demand, so

21 Dec 2020 • 4 min read

Tackling the Internet of Things with Roboflow: Object Detection Apps on Android

Joo chan Kim, PhD student, is developing an object detection application for Android devices that can identify specific IoT sensors by using a custom detection model.

15 Dec 2020 • 6 min read

How to Train Scaled-YOLOv4 to Detect Custom Objects

Object detection technology advances with the release of Scaled-YOLOv4. This blog is written to help you apply Scaled-YOLOv4 to your custom object detection task, to detect any object in the world, given the right training data.

15 Dec 2020 • 5 min read

Apple's M1 is up to 3.6x as fast at training machine learning models

We compared the Apple M1 chip to the Intel Core i5 chip on an object detection task using Create ML.

9 Dec 2020 • 2 min read

Unveiling Our New Limited Edition T-Shirt

SUMMARY Roboflow is offering a limited-edition t-shirt, designed by Los Angeles artist Von Deon, to community members whose computer vision projects get featured on the Roboflow blog. Von Deon's design features an abstract rendering of Lenny, Roboflow's raccoon mascot, with his signature floral style.

8 Dec 2020 • 2 min read

Introducing Roboflow Annotate

SUMMARY Roboflow Annotate is a self-serve image annotation tool built directly into the Roboflow platform, removing the friction of managing a separate labeling tool outside your pipeline. The integrated design supports team collaboration from a single source of truth and makes it straightforward to jump in and out of

6 Dec 2020 • 2 min read

Share Your Datasets with the Computer Vision Community

SUMMARY Roboflow offers to publicly host community-contributed computer vision datasets, making them discoverable to tens of thousands of developers and automatically indexed by Google Dataset Search. Hosted datasets are available for download in every major annotation format, including Pascal VOC XML, COCO JSON, and TFRecords, with no conversion work

4 Dec 2020 • 1 min read

Roboflow Changelog: December 2020

Welcome to the first of our monthly changelogs, where we will be cataloging our recent feature additions and improvements. Roboflow Organize * Added ability to rebalance train/test split * Clarified pro plan features in-app * Sped up thumbnail generation * Added image upload by URL to the upload API * Paginated the image

3 Dec 2020 • 8 min read

Scaled-YOLOv4 is Now the Best Model for Object Detection

SUMMARY Scaled-YOLOv4 set a new state-of-the-art result for object detection on the Microsoft COCO benchmark at the time of its publication, surpassing Google's EfficientDet across both the speed and accuracy ends of the performance frontier. The model achieves this by scaling the depth, stages,

20 Nov 2020 • 2 min read

Revamping Train, Validation, Test, Split Management

Splitting data into train, validation, and test splits is essential to building good computer vision models. Today, we are announcing in-app changes to Roboflow that make it even easier to manage your train test splits as you are working through the computer vision workflow.