Imagery collected on ModalAI drones

paul.foley

Are there any repositories of imagery collected on ModalAI drones that can be used for training an object detection model? I'm looking to use the Starling 2 Max for vehicle detection. The performance of a model is directly correlated with how well it's training data matches its intended use case. So, if somebody is planning to use a ModalAI drone, having training data that was collected on the same drone would be great. If that doesn't exist I do think it would be cool if there was a place where members of the ModalAI user community could upload imagery to be shared and used for training purposes in the future.

If there are any other datasets that you know of that would be helpful too. Thus far I've used the COWC dataset but that imagery was taken at a much higher altitude than what I would be flying with the Starling 2 Max.

Alex Kushleyev

@paul-foley , we do not have a repository for images.

My suggestions would be:

try using training sets from other sources (as you have been trying), but I don't have a specific reference
in order to better match the 3rd party datasets to your use case, you should try to do the following:
- transform the 3rd party images to make them look more similar to what you are looking for (crop, zoom, resize, adjust color, etc). This can be automated
- transform the images collected on Starling to some standard, for example you can perform fisheye un-distortion to make them look more like the images taken from non-fisheye cameras from your training set, similarly adjust color if needed (white balance).

In general, if you can somehow standardize your images, and convert the 3rd party images to the same standard, you can greatly benefit from the large data sets that you could find online. The only down side that when running the model online, you will need to transform your images in real time, but that should not be a big deal. If you need to, I can help you with some GPU-based examples to do image transformation very quickly, but you should first make sure that this approach will work for you first (and optimize later )

I hope this helps..

Alex