Guides
Guides for computer-vision engineers.
These guides are written for engineers who build and ship detection models. They cover what synthetic data is and when it beats real footage, how video datasets for surveillance and activity recognition are structured, how to train YOLO on generated images, and newer ideas such as dataset distillation.
Each guide is practical rather than promotional: definitions first, then trade-offs, formats and evaluation. If you want to try the data itself, every dataset in the catalogue has a free sample, and the blog explains how each one was built.
- 29 Oct 2026Buying Guide7 min read
What CCTV Training Data Costs in 2026: Free, Staged, Synthetic and Platforms
Public datasets, staged real footage from agencies, synthetic datasets and rendering platforms compared on price, labels, licence and what you actually get.
- 26 Oct 2026Model Training9 min read
Training a lying-on-the-ground detector on synthetic data only: D-FINE vs RF-DETR vs YOLO on real footage
D-FINE, RF-DETR and YOLO26 trained only on synthetic images, then scored on real CAUCAFall and GMDCSA-24 footage: method, full results, recipe and caveats.
- 24 Oct 2026Datasets11 min read
Violence and Aggression Detection Datasets Compared (2026)
RWF-2000, XD-Violence, UCF-Crime, UBI-Fights and four more fight datasets compared: size, source, labels, licence, and why CCTV hard negatives are missing.
- 24 Oct 2026Datasets10 min read
Weapon and Knife Detection Datasets Compared
Gun and knife detection datasets compared: Granada, Sohas, Mock Attack, YouTube-GDD and Kaggle sets. Size, classes, source, licence traps and look-alikes.
- 24 Oct 2026Datasets9 min read
Fall Detection Datasets: Public Options and What's Missing
UR Fall, Le2i, UP-Fall, Multicam, SisFall, FallAllD and thermal fall datasets compared: size, cameras, licence, and what is missing for CCTV and care homes.
- 24 Oct 2026Datasets12 min read
CCTV and Surveillance Datasets: Public Sources, Licences and Gaps (2026)
17 public CCTV and surveillance datasets compared by task, size, camera, labels and licence, from UCF-Crime to MOT20, and which ones allow commercial use.
- 24 Oct 2026Buying Guide10 min read
AI Security Camera Training Data: How Detectors Are Trained
Buyer's checklist for AI security camera training data: classes and hard negatives, YOLO/COCO labels, camera geometry, licences, validation and the EU AI Act.
- 24 Oct 2026Licensing10 min read
YOLO Licensing vs Dataset Licensing: What a Commercial Product Needs
Ultralytics YOLO is AGPL-3.0 unless you buy an Enterprise licence, and your training data has its own licence. What a commercial vision product needs from both.
- 18 Jun 2026Synthetic Data9 min read
What Is Synthetic Data for Computer Vision? A Complete Guide
Synthetic data is reshaping how computer vision models are trained. Here's how it works, why it matters, and where it outperforms real-world data.
- 18 Jun 2026Machine Learning8 min read
What Is Dataset Distillation? How It Works and Why It Matters
Dataset distillation compresses massive training sets into tiny synthetic ones that train models nearly as well. Here's the full breakdown.
- 24 Oct 2026Video Data8 min read
15 Video Datasets for Computer Vision, Compared (2026)
UCF101, Kinetics, NTU RGB+D, AVA, UCF-Crime, XD-Violence, UBnormal and more compared by size, classes, camera type and licence, plus what none of them covers.
- 4 Jul 2026Surveillance AI7 min read
CCTV Video Anomaly Detection Datasets: A Practical Guide
How CCTV video anomaly detection datasets are built, which behaviors matter (falls, fights, weapon draws, loitering), and why synthetic CCTV wins.
- 2 Aug 2026Video Data9 min read
Human Activity Recognition Datasets: Benchmarks, Labels and Gaps
What HAR data looks like, how activity clips are labeled, why public benchmarks break in deployment, and how synthetic video covers rare activities.
- 2 Aug 2026Model Training10 min read
Synthetic Data for YOLO Training: A Step-by-Step Guide
Train YOLOv8 or YOLOv11 on synthetic data — dataset layout, data.yaml, training commands, domain-gap fixes, and synthetic vs manual labeling results.
- 13 Jul 2026Synthetic Data8 min read
Synthetic Data vs Real Data for Computer Vision: A Practical Comparison
Head-to-head comparison of synthetic and real data for CV — cost, privacy, edge cases, annotation quality, and how to close the domain gap.
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