Case Study: The Field Museum accelerates scientific research with Roboflow vision AI

The Field Museum digitizes 13,000 tiger beetles in 4 weeks with Roboflow

The Field Museum, home to one of the world's largest natural history collections, faced the challenge of utilizing its several million insect specimens for large-scale research due to the sheer size of the collection. The slow, manual process of digitizing specimens and transcribing data hindered scientific progress. To solve this, the museum used Roboflow to develop custom computer vision models.

Using Roboflow's tools for annotation and cloud-based model training, the team built the DrawerDissect software to automate the digitization process. This solution enabled the museum to quickly process thousands of specimens, such as digitizing over 13,000 tiger beetles in just four weeks. The results unlocked new macroevolutionary research at a previously impossible scale, significantly accelerating scientific discovery.

The Field Museum