VGG Image Annotator

VGG Image Annotator is a simple and standalone manual annotation software for image, audio and video. VIA runs in a web browser and does not require any installation or setup. The complete VIA software fits in a single self-contained HTML page of size less than 400 Kilobyte that runs as an offline application in most modern web browsers. VIA is an open source project based solely on HTML, Javascript and CSS (no dependency on external libraries). VIA is developed at the Visual Geometry Group (VGG) and released under the BSD-2 clause license which allows it to be useful for both academic projects and commercial applications.

More details are available at: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/software/via/

Screenshots

Download

Detailed instructions for downloading the VIA software is available at http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/software/via/

Demo

We have created self contained demo to illustrate the usage of VIA. These demo have been preloaded with some sample images, audio and video. Furthermore, we have also added some sample manual annotations. These demo applications are very useful to get familiar with the commonly used features of VIA.

Open Source Ecosystem

The development of VIA software began in August 2016 and the first public release of version 1 was made in April 2017. Many new advanced features for image annotation were introduced in version 2 which was released in June 2018. Recently released version 3 of VIA software supports annotation of audio and video. As of July 2019, the VIA software has been used more than 1,000,000 times (+220,000 unique pageviews).

We have nurtured a large and thriving open source community which not only provides feedback but also contributes code to add new features and improve existing features in the VIA software. The open source ecosystem of VIA thrives around its source code repository hosted by the Gitlab platform. Most of our users report issues and request new features for future releases using the issue portal. Many of our users not only submit bug reports but also suggest a potential fix for these software issues. Some of our users also contribute code to add new features to the VIA software using the merge request portal.

We welcome all forms of contributions (code update, documentation, bug reports, etc) from users. Such contributions must must adhere to the existing license of the VIA project.

Developer's Resources

VIA software is developed using HTML, CSS and Javascript and is based solely on standard features available in modern web browsers. VIA does not depend on any external libraries. These design decisions has helped us create a very light weight and feature rich manaul annotation software that can run on most modern web browsers without requiring any installation or setup. The full VIA software sprouted from an early prototype of VIA which implemented a minimal -- yet functional -- image annotation tool using only 40 lines of HTML/CSS/Javascript code that runs as an offline application in most modern web browsers. This early prototype provides a springboard for understanding the current codebase of VIA which is just an extension of the early prototype. The introductory tutorials prepared by Mozilla is also very helpful in understanding the basic concepts of HTML/CSS/Javascript platform.

The VIA source code repository contains a separate folder for each major version of VIA: via-1.x.y, via-2.x.y and via-3.x.y. The development of each version is carried out in a separate branch (e.g. via-2.x.y branch. If you wish to contribute code to VIA (we encourage you to do so), please send a pull request to one of the branches. Please do not send pull requests to the master branch. All contributions must adhere to the existing license of the VIA project.

We have prepared the following code documentation for each major version of VIA:

Code review of via-1.0.0 was completed by @ecoto in Feb. 2017. Please let us know if you would like to contribute to VIA project by reviewing its software code. Here are some updates on this issue:

16 July 2019: Ben Armstrong is now conducting a code review of via-2.x.y codebase.

Citation

If you use this software, please cite it as follows:

Abhishek Dutta and Andrew Zisserman. 2019. The VIA Annotation Software for Images, Audio and Video. In Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM ’19), October 21–25, 2019, Nice, France. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3343031.3350535.

@inproceedings{dutta2019vgg,
  author = {Dutta, Abhishek and Zisserman, Andrew},
  title = {The {VIA} Annotation Software for Images, Audio and Video},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Multimedia},
  series = {MM '19},
  year = {2019},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-6889-6/19/10},
  location = {Nice, France},
  numpages = {4},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3343031.3350535},
  doi = {10.1145/3343031.3350535},
  publisher = {ACM},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
} 

@misc{dutta2016via,
  author = "Dutta, A. and Gupta, A. and Zissermann, A.",
  title = "{VGG} Image Annotator ({VIA})",
  year = "2016",
  howpublished = "http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/software/via/",
  note = "Version: X.Y.Z, Accessed: INSERT_DATE_HERE" 
}

Contact

Contact Abhishek Dutta for any queries or feedback related to this application.

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by EPSRC programme grant Seebibyte: Visual Search for the Era of Big Data ( EP/M013774/1 )

RaSMiY/VGG