6 posts tagged with "computer-vision"

The Robot Operating System (ROS) stands as a versatile framework for developing sophisticated robotic applications with various sensors, including cameras. These cameras are relatively inexpensive and widely used as they can provide a wealth of information about the robot's environment.

Processing camera output with computer vision requires efficient solutions to handle massive amounts of data in real time. ROS 2 is designed with this in mind, but it is a communication middleware and does not provide a built-in solution for storing and managing large volumes of image data.

Addressing this challenge, this blog post will guide you through setting up ROS 2 with ReductStore—a time-series database for unstructured data optimized for edge computing, ensuring your robotic applications can process and store camera outputs effectively.

When it comes to computer vision, data storage is a critical component. You need to be able to store images for model training, as well as the results of the processing for model validation. There are a few ways to go about this, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. In this post, we’ll take a look at three different ways to store data in computer vision applications: a file system, an S3-like object storage and ReductStore. We’ll also discuss some of the pros and cons of each option.

A Simple Computer Vision Application​

For demonstration purposes, we’ll use a simple computer vision application which is connected to a CV camera and runs on an edge device:

The camera driver captures images from the CV camera every second and forwards them to the model, which then detects objects and displays the results in the user interface.

Your images and results need to be stored for training and validation purposes. The customer may also wish to view images featuring anomalous objects. These requirements present the challenge of maintaining a history of blob or unstructured data.

In this article, we will compare two data storage solutions: ReductStore and Minio. Both offer on-premise blob storage, but they approach it differently. Minio provides traditional S3-like blob storage, while ReductStore is a time series database designed to store a history of blob data. We will focus on their application in scenarios that require storage and access to a history of unstructured data. This includes images from a computer vision camera, vibration sensor data, or binary packages common in industrial data.

Handling Historical Data​

S3-like blob storage is commonly used to store data of different formats and sizes in the cloud or internal storage. It can also accommodate historical data as a series of blobs. A simple approach is to create a folder for each data source and save objects with timestamps in their names:

bucket
 |
 |---cv_camera
        |---1666225094312397.jpeg
        |---1666225094412397.jpeg
        |---1666225094512397.jpeg

Photo by Luke Southern on Unsplash

In the thriving world of IoT, integrating MLOps for Edge AI is important for creating intelligent, autonomous devices that are not only efficient but also trustworthy and manageable.

MLOps—or Machine Learning Operations—is a multidisciplinary field that mixes machine learning, data engineering, and DevOps to streamline the lifecycle of AI models.

In this field, important factors to consider are:

• explainability, ensuring that decisions made by AI are interpretable by humans;

• orchestration, which involves managing the various components of machine learning in production–at scale; and

• reproducibility, guaranteeing consistent results across different environments or experiments.

Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash

The journey of taking an open-source artificial intelligence (AI) model from a laboratory setting to real-world implementation can seem daunting. However, with the right understanding and approach, this transition becomes a manageable task.

This blog post aims to serve as a compass on this technical adventure. We'll demystify key concepts, and delve into practical steps for implementing anomaly detection models effectively in real-time scenarios.

Let's dive in and see how open-source models can be implemented in production, bridging the gap between research and practical applications.

The ReductStore Project hosts the free "cats" dataset, which contains about 10K photos of cats in JPEG format with eye coordinates, a month, and ears as labels. In this example, we can learn how to download the dataset from the ReductStore instance and draw the features using the OpenCV library.

Installing Dependencies​

First, we need to install the ReductStore Client SDK for Python to download the photos and labels. We also need the OpenCV Python library for drawing features and Pillow to display images in the Jupyter environment:

pip install reduct-py opencv-python Pillow

Getting Data​

To retrieve data we need the URL of the ReductStore instance, the bucket name, where we store our datasets and an API token with read access, so that we can connect to the database by using the Client class:

from reduct import Client, Bucket

HOST = "https://play.reduct.store"
API_TOKEN = "dataset-read-eab13e4f5f2df1e64363806443eea7ba83406ce701d49378d2f54cfbf02850f5"
BUCKET = "datasets"

client = Client(HOST, api_token=API_TOKEN)

bucket: Bucket = await client.get_bucket(BUCKET)