Handwriting recognition is the process of converting handwritten physical text into a digital format. Sometimes referred to as handwriting OCR, handwriting recognition (HWR), or handwriting text recognition (HTR), converting written text into a machine-readable format has speed and efficiency advantages that reduce the dependency on manual data entry. OCR vs Handwriting Recognition Optical character recognition, or OCR, is similar to handwriting recognition in that it works towards the same common goal of converting visual representations of text into digital ones. Yet, OCR has a uniquely dif ..read more

This blog post is contributed by Hart Woolery, Founder and CEO, 2020CV. Introduction I’ve always been fascinated by special effects in movies and video games. My career took an interesting turn in 2017 when I began experimenting with OpenCV to potentially land a job in the field of Computer Vision (which seemed to be a popular job posting at the time). Little did I know that a ridiculous side project, involving virtual hand puppets, would eventually land me a deal with famed investor Mark Cuban and the formation of my company, 2020CV. 0:00 /0:14 1× Computer vision powered AR experience Source ..read more

The article below was contributed by Timothy Malche, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Applications at Manipal University Jaipur. Keypoint detection in computer vision is a technique used to identify distinctive points or locations in an image that can be used as references for further analysis such as object recognition, pose estimation, or motion tracking etc. In this blog post we will walk through how to use Roboflow’s Keypoint Detection feature to label the object, a water bottle in our example, with “key points” and train it using Roboflow’s auto training feature ..read more

This article was contributed to the Roboflow blog by Abirami Vina. Advances in AI over the last few years, such as those made by Google's MediaPipe, make it possible to create incredible experiences that blend the digital and physical worlds together. MediaPipe is an open-source framework developed for building machine learning pipelines. MediaPipe is especially useful for developers who are working with videos and images.  Whether you're making an app with fun filters for your face or one that can identify different sounds, MediaPipe has everything you need. In this article, we’ll under ..read more

This article was contributed to the Roboflow blog by Abirami Vina. When you look at a person, you can instinctively tell whether they are sitting, standing, slouching, or walking around. Your brain has an intuitive understanding of the human body and the different postures associated with it. Can a machine also be taught to identify poses in images? Yes! That’s exactly what pose estimation is. Pose estimation is a computer vision technique that can pinpoint the key body joints of a person in images and videos to understand their pose. OpenPose is a popular computer vision real-time system des ..read more

The article below was contributed by Timothy Malche, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Applications at Manipal University Jaipur. Manual rebar counting is a time-consuming task and prone to errors and inconsistencies. But, you can automate rebar counting with computer vision. You can use a fine-tuned computer vision model to count individual pieces of rebar, useful for building inventory management and quality verification systems IIn this blog post we will learn how to use computer vision to automate rebar counting. The rebar counting system we will build uses cameras ..read more

Semantic segmentation is a computer vision task that involves assigning each pixel in an image a label so that machines can recognize objects and their meanings. Semantic segmentation is commonly used for vision tasks that require absolute precision. This is in contrast to bounding box identification, which tells you the general region of an object but not to the pixel level. This blog post serves as an introduction to the basics of semantic segmentation, offering insights into how it operates and examining various methods for its use. What is Semantic Segmentation? Semantic segmentation is t ..read more

You can now deploy Roboflow Inference into any cloud with Skypilot. In this guide, we walk through how to deploy Inference with Skypilot. ? We have made a Colab notebook that walks through deploying models with Roboflow and Skypilot to accompany this guide. Further Reading Read the Inference Cloud Deploy documentation, including all the options available, and more about Skypilot. What is Inference? Roboflow Inference is an open-source platform that simplifies the deployment of state-of-the-art foundation and custom computer vision models. Inference allows you to perform object detection, cl ..read more

Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, can be an incredibly beneficial addition to any system, especially when integrated with computer vision. OCR and computer vision can work on images but could be even more powerful when used on videos and video streams. 0:00 /0:09 1× An annotated video of the final result of running OCR on video In this article, you will learn how to use OCR models and combine them with computer vision tools to build applications that process videos How to Use OCR on Videos For static video files, you can run OCR on all the image frames within the video file. In this guid ..read more

YOLOv5, released by Ultralytics on June 25th, 2020, is a computer vision model that supports object detection. For example, you can train an object detection model to detect the location of wooden pallets in a manufacturing facility. YOLOv5 has since been largely replaced with Ultralytics YOLOv8. With that said, YOLOv5 continues to have an active community with many models deployed in production. We recommend checking out how to detect objects with YOLOv8, but if you still need YOLOv5 we have you covered. In this guide, we are going to walk through how to detect objects with YOLOv5. We will u ..read more