Earlier this week, OpenAI dropped a bomb on the computer vision world: two new groundbreaking models that hint at what’s to come as massive GPT3-esque Transformer models encroach on the vision domain. While DALL-E (a model that can generate images from text prompts) has garnered much of the attention this week, this post focuses on CLIP: a zero-shot classifier which is arguably even more consequential.

Until now, classifying images has involved collecting a custom dataset of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of labeled images that suitably represent your targeted classes and using it to train a supervised classification model (usually…

Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence that encompasses a wide area of software designed to reason about and act on text data. NLP technology is rapidly advancing and it can be difficult to sort out which NLP techniques are making the most impact in industry.

In this post, we will introduce and discuss the natural language processing techniques that have become widely adopted and used in real life applications.

Let’s dive in.

A Brief History of Natural Language Processing

The field of natural language processing traces its roots back all the way to Alan Turing and the Turing test — can a computer…

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.

The YOLO v4 model is currently one of the best architectures to use to train a custom object detector, and the capabilities of the Darknet repository are vast. In this post, we discuss and implement ten advanced tactics in YOLO v4 so you can build the best object detection model from your custom dataset.

Note: this discussion assumes that you have already trained YOLO v4. To get started, check out our guide on training YOLOv4. The advanced tactics here will build from that basic training flow.

YOLO v4 Advanced Tactics RoadMap:

• Gather More Data
• Image Preprocessing and Augmentation
• Image Input…

In computer vision datasets, the question is pervasive — what is a label map?

In this post, we will demystify the label map by discussing the role that it plays in the computer vision annotation process. Then we will get hands on with some real life examples using a label map.

Common Errors Requiring a Label Map

• Class names missing
• Class names show as integers
• Class names do not match my dataset’s class names
• Class labels not recognized
• Class labels are numbers

The Role of the Label Map

Computer vision datasets come in all flavors of formats. Roboflow supports the injection, conversion, and exportation of over 30 computer vision formats. …

To improve your model’s performance on small objects, we recommend the following techniques:

• Increasing your image capture resolution
• Increasing your model’s input resolution
• Tiling your images
• Generating more data via augmentation
• Auto learning model anchors
• Filtering out extraneous classes

Why is the Small Object Problem Hard?

The small object problem plagues object detection models worldwide. Not buying it? Check the COCO evaluation results for recent state of the art models YOLOv3, EfficientDet, and YOLOv4:

PP-YOLO evaluation metrics show improved performance over YOLOv4, the incumbent state of the art object detection model. Yet, the Baidu authors write:

This paper is not intended to introduce a novel object detector. It is more like a recipe, which tell you how to build a better detector step by step.

Let’s unpack that.

YOLO Development History

YOLO was originally authored by Joseph Redmon to detect objects. Object detection is a computer vision technique that localizes and tags objects by drawing a bounding box around them and identifying the class label that a given box belongs too. …

With the recent release of the TensorFlow 2 Object Detection API, it has never been easier to train and deploy custom state of the art object detection models with TensorFlow. To build a custom model you can leverage your own custom dataset to detect your own custom objects: foods, pets, mechanical parts, and more.

In this blog and TensorFlow 2 Object Detection Colab Notebook, we walk through how you can train your own custom object detector in minutes, by changing a single line of code for your dataset import.

In order to train our custom object detector with the TensorFlow…