A survey of image labelling for computer vision applications
It provides a comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners in computer vision who need labeled data, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing tools without introducing new methods.
This survey systematizes existing image labeling software by analyzing their commonalities and distinctions through a structured literature review, identifying application archetypes and key domains like healthcare and television.
Supervised machine learning methods for image analysis require large amounts of labelled training data to solve computer vision problems. The recent rise of deep learning algorithms for recognising image content has led to the emergence of many ad-hoc labelling tools. With this survey, we capture and systematise the commonalities as well as the distinctions between existing image labelling software. We perform a structured literature review to compile the underlying concepts and features of image labelling software such as annotation expressiveness and degree of automation. We structure the manual labelling task by its organisation of work, user interface design options, and user support techniques to derive a systematisation schema for this survey. Applying it to available software and the body of literature, enabled us to uncover several application archetypes and key domains such as image retrieval or instance identification in healthcare or television.