---
comments: true
description: Dive into advanced data exploration with Ultralytics Explorer. Perform semantic searches, execute SQL queries, and leverage AI-powered natural language insights for seamless data analysis.
keywords: Ultralytics Explorer, data exploration, semantic search, vector similarity, SQL queries, AI, natural language queries, machine learning, OpenAI, LLMs, Ultralytics Platform
---

# VOC Exploration Example

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Welcome to the Ultralytics Explorer API notebook. This notebook introduces the resources available for exploring datasets with semantic search, vector search, and SQL queries.

Try `yolo explorer` (powered by the Explorer API)

Install `ultralytics` and run `yolo explorer` in your terminal to run custom queries and semantic search in your browser.

!!! warning "Community Note ⚠️"

    As of **`ultralytics>=8.3.12`**, Ultralytics Explorer has been removed. To use Explorer, install `pip install ultralytics==8.3.11`. Similar (and expanded) dataset exploration features are available in [Ultralytics Platform](https://platform.ultralytics.com/).

## Setup

Install `ultralytics` and the required [dependencies](https://github.com/ultralytics/ultralytics/blob/main/pyproject.toml), then check software and hardware.

```bash
!uv pip install ultralytics[explorer] openai
yolo checks
```

## Similarity Search

Utilize the power of vector similarity search to find the similar data points in your dataset along with their distance in the embedding space. Simply create an embeddings table for the given dataset-model pair. It is only needed once, and it is reused automatically.

```python
exp = Explorer("VOC.yaml", model="yolo11n.pt")
exp.create_embeddings_table()
```

Once the embeddings table is built, you can run semantic search in any of the following ways:

- On a given index/list of indices in the dataset, e.g., `exp.get_similar(idx=[1, 10], limit=10)`
- On any image/ list of images not in the dataset - exp.get_similar(img=["path/to/img1", "path/to/img2"], limit=10) In case of multiple inputs, the aggregate of their embeddings is used.

You get a pandas DataFrame with the limit number of most similar data points to the input, along with their distance in the embedding space. You can use this dataset to perform further filtering.

![Ultralytics Explorer similarity search results](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/ultralytics/assets@main/docs/similarity-search-table.avif)

```python
# Search dataset by index
similar = exp.get_similar(idx=1, limit=10)
similar.head()
```

You can also plot the similar samples directly using the `plot_similar` util

![Similar images found by vector search](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/ultralytics/assets@main/docs/similarity-search-image-1.avif)

```python
exp.plot_similar(idx=6500, limit=20)
exp.plot_similar(idx=[100, 101], limit=10)  # Can also pass list of idxs or imgs

exp.plot_similar(img="https://ultralytics.com/images/bus.jpg", limit=10, labels=False)  # Can also pass external images
```

![Similarity search visualization with embeddings](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/ultralytics/assets@main/docs/similarity-search-image-2.avif)

## Ask AI: Search or Filter with Natural Language

You can prompt the Explorer object with the kind of data points you want to see, and it will try to return a DataFrame with those results. Because it is powered by LLMs, it does not always get it right. In that case, it will return `None`.

![Ultralytics Explorer Ask AI natural language query results](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/ultralytics/assets@main/docs/ask-ai-nlp-table.avif)

```python
df = exp.ask_ai("show me images containing more than 10 objects with at least 2 persons")
df.head(5)
```

To plot these results, you can use the `plot_query_result` utility. Example:

```python
plt = plot_query_result(exp.ask_ai("show me 10 images containing exactly 2 persons"))
Image.fromarray(plt)
```

![Ask AI query result showing matched images](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/ultralytics/assets@main/docs/ask-ai-nlp-image-1.avif)

```python
# plot
from PIL import Image
from ultralytics.data.explorer import plot_query_result

plt = plot_query_result(exp.ask_ai("show me 10 images containing exactly 2 persons"))
Image.fromarray(plt)
```

## Run SQL Queries on Your Dataset

Sometimes you might want to investigate certain entries in your dataset. For this, Explorer allows you to execute SQL queries. It accepts either of the following formats:

- Queries beginning with "WHERE" will automatically select all columns. This can be thought of as a shorthand query.
- You can also write full queries where you can specify which columns to select.

This can be used to investigate model performance and specific data points. For example:

- let's say your model struggles on images that have humans and dogs. You can write a query like this to select the points that have at least 2 humans AND at least one dog.

You can combine SQL query and semantic search to filter down to specific type of results

```python
table = exp.sql_query("WHERE labels LIKE '%person, person%' AND labels LIKE '%dog%' LIMIT 10")
exp.plot_sql_query("WHERE labels LIKE '%person, person%' AND labels LIKE '%dog%' LIMIT 10", labels=True)
```

![Explorer SQL query results table](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/ultralytics/assets@main/docs/sql-queries-table.avif)

```python
table = exp.sql_query("WHERE labels LIKE '%person, person%' AND labels LIKE '%dog%' LIMIT 10")
print(table)
```

Just like similarity search, you also get a util to directly plot the sql queries using `exp.plot_sql_query`

![SQL query matched images visualization](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/ultralytics/assets@main/docs/sql-query-image-1.avif)

```python
exp.plot_sql_query("WHERE labels LIKE '%person, person%' AND labels LIKE '%dog%' LIMIT 10", labels=True)
```

## Working with embeddings Table (Advanced)

Explorer works on [LanceDB](https://lancedb.github.io/lancedb/) tables internally. You can access this table directly, using `Explorer.table` object and run raw queries, push down pre- and post-filters, etc.

```python
table = exp.table
print(table.schema)
```

### Run raw queries¶

Vector Search finds the nearest vectors from the database. In a recommendation system or search engine, you can find similar products from the one you searched. In LLM and other AI applications, each data point can be presented by the embeddings generated from some models, it returns the most relevant features.

A search in high-dimensional vector space, is to find K-Nearest-Neighbors (KNN) of the query vector.

Metric In LanceDB, a Metric is the way to describe the distance between a pair of vectors. Currently, it supports the following metrics:

- L2
- Cosine
- Dot Explorer's similarity search uses L2 by default. You can run queries on tables directly, or use the lance format to build custom utilities to manage datasets. More details on available LanceDB table ops in the [docs](https://lancedb.github.io/lancedb/)

![Explorer raw SQL queries results table](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/ultralytics/assets@main/docs/raw-queries-table.avif)

```python
dummy_img_embedding = [i for i in range(256)]
table.search(dummy_img_embedding).limit(5).to_pandas()
```

### Interconversion to popular data formats

```python
df = table.to_pandas()
pa_table = table.to_arrow()
```

### Work with Embeddings

You can access the raw embedding from lancedb Table and analyze it. The image embeddings are stored in column `vector`

```python
import numpy as np

embeddings = table.to_pandas()["vector"].tolist()
embeddings = np.array(embeddings)
```

### Scatterplot

One of the preliminary steps in analyzing embeddings is by plotting them in 2D space via dimensionality reduction. Let's try an example

![Explorer embeddings scatterplot visualization](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/ultralytics/assets@main/docs/scatterplot-sql-queries.avif)

```python
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from sklearn.decomposition import PCA  # pip install scikit-learn

# Reduce dimensions using PCA to 3 components for visualization in 3D
pca = PCA(n_components=3)
reduced_data = pca.fit_transform(embeddings)

# Create a 3D scatter plot using Matplotlib's Axes3D
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(8, 6))
ax = fig.add_subplot(111, projection="3d")

# Scatter plot
ax.scatter(reduced_data[:, 0], reduced_data[:, 1], reduced_data[:, 2], alpha=0.5)
ax.set_title("3D Scatter Plot of Reduced 256-Dimensional Data (PCA)")
ax.set_xlabel("Component 1")
ax.set_ylabel("Component 2")
ax.set_zlabel("Component 3")

plt.show()
```

### Similarity Index

Here's a simple example of an operation powered by the embeddings table. Explorer comes with a `similarity_index` operation-

- It tries to estimate how similar each data point is with the rest of the dataset.
- It does that by counting how many image embeddings lie closer than max_dist to the current image in the generated embedding space, considering top_k similar images at a time.

For a given dataset, model, `max_dist` & `top_k` the similarity index once generated will be reused. In case, your dataset has changed, or you simply need to regenerate the similarity index, you can pass `force=True`. Similar to vector and SQL search, this also comes with a util to directly plot it.

```python
sim_idx = exp.similarity_index(max_dist=0.2, top_k=0.01)
exp.plot_similarity_index(max_dist=0.2, top_k=0.01)
```

![Dataset similarity index analysis](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/ultralytics/assets@main/docs/similarity-index.avif)

Let's look at the plot first

```python
exp.plot_similarity_index(max_dist=0.2, top_k=0.01)
```

Now let's look at the output of the operation

```python
sim_idx = exp.similarity_index(max_dist=0.2, top_k=0.01, force=False)

sim_idx
```

Let's create a query to see what data points have similarity count of more than 30 and plot images similar to them.

```python
import numpy as np

sim_count = np.array(sim_idx["count"])
sim_idx["im_file"][sim_count > 30]
```

You should see something like this

![Similarity index visualization for dataset analysis](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/ultralytics/assets@main/docs/similarity-index-image.avif)

```python
exp.plot_similar(idx=[7146, 14035])  # Using avg embeddings of 2 images
```
