Case Studies

24 Oct 2021 • 4 min read

AI Football Play Generator

SUMMARY Scott Bronkema, a former college football player turned developer, built a computer vision application that automatically identifies player positions and formations at the pre-snap moment and tracks player routes throughout each play, outputting a digital playbook diagram. Built with Roboflow for model training and annotation plus OpenCV for

20 Sep 2021 • 4 min read

How I Used Computer Vision to Make Sense of My Fridge

As part of a groupwork for a postgraduate applied AI at Erasmus Brussels we made an object detection model to identify ingredients in a fridge.

16 Sep 2021 • 3 min read

We Raised a $20M Series A to Continue Democratizing Computer Vision

Today, Roboflow is excited to announce our $20 million Series A led by Craft Ventures to expand on our mission to give software the sense of sight. Lachy Groom, who co-led the seed with Craft, also participated in the round. Additionally, we welcomed new investment from leaders like Jack

7 Aug 2021 • 5 min read

Using Computer Vision to Accelerate Microbiology Research and Combat Antibiotic Resistance

Michael Shamash is a Master’s student in the Maurice Lab at Canada's McGill University. Michael used Roboflow to streamline the production of a model and iOS app for use in microbiology.

19 Jul 2021 • 3 min read

Using Computer Vision to Clean the World's Oceans

SUMMARY Researchers from CSU Monterey Bay, The Ocean Cleanup, and UC San Diego built a computer vision model to detect underwater plastic debris for autonomous underwater vehicles. Using a 3,200-image dataset collected from real California field sites and annotated with Roboflow, the team compared YOLOv4, YOLOv4-tiny, and

7 Jul 2021 • 7 min read

How Atos Uses Computer Vision to Monitor Office Occupancy

SUMMARY Atos, a digital transformation firm with over 100,000 employees, built a privacy-first office occupancy counter using computer vision and Roboflow, going from initial data collection to a production client demo running on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano in under 60 days. The system connects to existing security camera

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.

19 Jan 2021 • 4 min read

Using Computer Vision to Detect Package Deliveries

SUMMARY A Jetson Nano paired with a $100 IP camera and a model trained iteratively through Roboflow makes a practical, locally-run package detection system that sends a phone notification with a cropped view of the delivered package. The model was built starting from just 15 labeled images, then grown

4 Jan 2021 • 6 min read

Using Computer Vision to Boost Cities' Efficiency by Reallocating Police Resources

SUMMARY Data scientist Joseph Rosenblum built a computer vision system that turns existing CCTV footage into automated traffic enforcement, detecting violations like crosswalk blockages that officers would otherwise need to monitor in person. The model was trained on the WebCamT dataset of low-resolution New York City webcam footage with

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 Nov 2020 • 3 min read

Generating Renaissance Art with Computer Vision

SUMMARY Two high school students built a DCGAN during a 24-hour hackathon to generate abstract images in the style of Renaissance paintings, training on roughly 300 images sourced from the web. They used Roboflow to preprocess and scale images to 32x32 pixels, and applied data augmentation (reflections and rotations)

15 Nov 2020 • 4 min read

Bringing Street Murals to Life with Computer Vision

SUMMARY Software engineer Yuri Fukuda built a mobile computer vision app that lets users point a phone at the 3,300-square-foot When Women Pursue Justice mural in Brooklyn and identify the 90 women depicted. She captured photos from multiple angles, labeled them, applied image augmentation in Roboflow to

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.