Case Studies

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

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.

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

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,

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

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

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 • 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

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.

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

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.

30 Oct 2020 • 5 min read

How This Fulbright Scholar is Using Computer Vision to Protect Endangered Species

SUMMARY Kasim Rafiq, a Fulbright Scholar and National Geographic Explorer at UC Santa Cruz, is building a vehicle-mounted computer vision system that automatically detects and photographs wildlife during safari game drives, then uses those detections for species population surveys at a fraction of the cost of traditional field methods.

12 Oct 2020 • 2 min read

Fighting Wildfires with Computer Vision

SUMMARY Abhishek Ghosh, a graduate student at Texas A&M working with AI For Mankind, trained an EfficientDet D0 computer vision model to detect early smoke from forest fires using images from weather towers. Using Roboflow Pro, he applied advanced augmentations and a static crop along the horizon line

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

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

28 Jul 2020 • 14 min read

Benchmarking the Major Cloud Vision AutoML Tools

Until now, there has been little independent research published on the performance of AutoML tools - (both relative to each other and against state of the art open source models)

21 Jul 2020 • 6 min read

Improving Infrastructure Asset Management with Computer Vision

SUMMARY Result! Data built a mobile app called Spobber that uses computer vision to detect hectometre signs along Dutch highways, verifying whether field assets match database records and flagging missing or damaged signs automatically. This guest post walks through their full pipeline: data collection from a moving vehicle, annotation, augmentation

18 Jul 2020 • 9 min read

Retail Store Item Detection using YOLOv5

SUMMARY This tutorial trains a YOLOv5 model on the SKU110k dataset to detect and localize products on retail store shelves, with dataset preparation handled through Roboflow and model training run in Google Colab. The resulting detector draws bounding boxes around shelf items and can support inventory tracking or automated checkout

1 Jul 2020 • 3 min read

How AI Acts as a Human Rights Watchdog for the Maasai People

SUMMARY A team of students built a computer vision system that processes satellite imagery from Google Earth Engine to monitor Maasai villages in Kenya and Tanzania, tracking settlement size, health, and evidence of burning to document land displacement by government and conservation interests. The model was trained using Roboflow'

28 Jun 2020 • 6 min read

Improving Uno with Computer Vision (Plus the Dataset so You Can Too)

SUMMARY Software engineer Adam Crawshaw built an Android app that uses object detection to automatically score Uno hands, handling the multi-round point system most players overlook. Starting from 41 source card images, he used OpenCV to synthetically composite cards into stacked groups, producing a dataset of 8,992 images

25 Jun 2020 • 7 min read

Creating BoardBoss: A Mobile Application that Improves Boggle

SUMMARY BoardBoss is a free iOS app, built by the Roboflow team, that scans a Boggle board with a smartphone camera, identifies letters in any orientation across more than 30 classes, and overlays all valid word solutions in augmented reality. The post walks through the full pipeline: collecting 355 images

3 Jun 2020 • 3 min read

Teaching a Drone to Fly on Auto Pilot with Roboflow

SUMMARY Victor Antony, a data scientist at the University of Rochester, built a computer vision autopilot system to detect gates that a drone must fly through, starting from only 300 images captured in a warehouse. Using Roboflow, he applied augmentations for rotation, lighting, and blur to expand the dataset to