WebMonks

Bring state-of-the-art Computer Vision Research to your Development.

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

WebMonks’ founders Jonatan and Maarten conceptualized an idea to drive social change through technological R&D in late 2015. One year and a half later, they found themselves successfully pursuing that vision. It had become WebMonks’ mission to become an expert computer vision research centre, with a non-profit manual image annotation branch which generates fair work in third world countries. At the time, their service and expertise proved a difficult fit for the Belgian market. The US proved itself a much better target for innovative customers, and soon demand for WebMonks’ consulting service grew from across the Atlantic. As more and more European computer vision PhD’s and scientists joined WebMonks, the team started to develop expertise in creating synthetic training environment for visual Artificial Intelligence. Their procedural computer graphics solutions allowed them to generate high quality synthetic images at large scale, which meant they could tackle challenges where state-of-the-art Deep Learning solutions usually failed. After a significant increase in demand for computer vision consulting and generation of synthetic data, finally there came a demand for annotating real data as well. This created the opportunity for WebMonks to generate real, fair jobs in development countries. Becoming an expert computer vision centre had paid off more than economical or technological impact, it now also generated social impact. Today, WebMonks is a team of 15 scientists spread all over Europe, with expertise ranging from computer vision to deep learning to procedural CGI. Their members have successfully completed projects for high-tech companies in Visual Search, Image Recognition, Augmented Reality, Drone and Autonomous Vehicle Technology. Together, they generate quality work for over 100 families in development countries overseas.