The VIA Annotation Software for Images, Audio and Video
This tool addresses the need for accessible and offline annotation software for researchers and practitioners in computer vision and multimedia, though it is incremental as it builds on existing annotation concepts.
The authors introduced VIA, a lightweight, standalone web-based annotation tool for images, audio, and video that enables manual annotation of spatial and temporal regions, with features for collaborative work and export to formats like JSON and CSV.
In this paper, we introduce a simple and standalone manual annotation tool for images, audio and video: the VGG Image Annotator (VIA). This is a light weight, standalone and offline software package that does not require any installation or setup and runs solely in a web browser. The VIA software allows human annotators to define and describe spatial regions in images or video frames, and temporal segments in audio or video. These manual annotations can be exported to plain text data formats such as JSON and CSV and therefore are amenable to further processing by other software tools. VIA also supports collaborative annotation of a large dataset by a group of human annotators. The BSD open source license of this software allows it to be used in any academic project or commercial application.