Roboflow Blog

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.

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