Lightly

What is Lightly?

Lightly is a computer vision platform for "Physical AI," the training data and models used by robots, drones and vehicles. It covers data curation, labeling, model pretraining and deployment, and it also publishes open-source tools.

Key capabilities of Lightly

• LightlyStudio: handles data curation, labeling, QA and evaluation in one place.
• Sampling strategies: six strategies including deduplication, outlier detection and class balancing.
• Similarity search: supports text and image similarity search, with embeddings created on indexing.
• LightlyTrain: pretrains and fine-tunes vision models on your own data.
• Format support: imports and exports COCO, YOLO, Pascal VOC, KITTI and other formats.
• Team roles: Viewer, Labeler, Editor and Admin access levels.

How Lightly works

You move data into LightlyStudio through the Python SDK, drag-and-drop upload or plugins. Data is embedded automatically, and you select samples with similarity search and sampling strategies. Annotation happens in the app with versioned annotations, and per-sample evaluation metrics and a confusion matrix show model performance. LightlyTrain installs with pip install lightly-train.

Who uses Lightly?

Lightly is for machine learning and computer vision teams building perception systems for robots, drones and vehicles, who need to pick the most useful data to label and train on. Deployment can be cloud, hybrid or on-premise.

Lightly pricing

The vendor says LightlyStudio is available to try for free. It does not list plan prices publicly; details come from a demo or the documentation.

Lightly alternatives

Segments.ai is a labeling platform for multi-sensor and image data. CVAT is an open-source annotation tool you host yourself. Scale AI offers managed data labeling services at scale. Lightly differs by emphasizing data selection and curation so teams label less data.