Annotate Your Image — Using Online Annotation Tool!

You just got an exciting project where you have to build a program to detect if a door is open or closed using an image. You have collected a few hundred images of open doors and closed doors. Now, you need to annotate and label each door in the images so that you can train a machine learning model to detect open/closed doors.

Image annotation is an important step in creating machine learning models for tasks such as object-detection, image classification and image segmentation.

You search for annotation tools on Google and find more than a few options and are now confused on which tool to use to annotate your images. If this is you, I will make your decision making process a bit easier by going through one of the open-source annotation tools that exists today.

If you want to know more about different image annotation types for in detail: bounding boxes, polygonal segmentation, semantic segmentation, 3D cuboids, key-points and landmark, and lines and splines,read more here.

Let’s jump into the open-source online annotation tool — MakeSense.

MakeSense is an open-source and free to use annotation tool under GPLv3 license. It does not require any advanced installations, just need a web browser to run it.

• Open-source
• Free
• Web based

The user-interface is simple and easy to use. You simply upload the images you want to annotate, annotate the images and export the labels. MakeSense supports multiple annotations: bounding box, polygon and point annotation. You can export the labels in different formats including YOLO, VOC XML, VGG JSON and CSV.

As per the website, MakeSense does not store the images, because they don’t send them anywhere.

Here is a step-by-step guide to using MakeSense annotation tool.

1. Go to www.makesense.ai

2. Click the bottom-right box to go to annotation page and you will see the following page where you can upload images you want to annotate.

3. After selecting and uploading images, click “Object Detection” button.

4. Since you do not have any labels loaded, you will be asked to create label names list for your project.

To add a new label, click the + sign on the top left corner of the message box, and enter the label in the “Insert Label” text field. Repeat, for all labels.

When you have added all labels, select “Start project” .

5. Here, you have an option to either use a pre-trained model to help you with the labelling or do the labelling all on your own. For this post, let’s go with the “I’m going on my own” and do all the labelling manually.

6. You will see the uploaded images on the left column, the annotations on the right column and the image currently selected for annotation in the middle column.

In the annotations column, you can select from different annotation types: Bounding Box, Point, and Polygon . For this post, let’s use bounding box annotation and annotate Open Door and Closed Door in the images.

For annotating an object, simply hover over the object in the selected image, click and drag to create a rectangular box of the intended size.

After creating the bounding box, a new entry is added under Bounding Box column on the right. Click to select desired label for the object.

7. Repeat the annotation steps for all objects in all images.

8. When you have annotated all the images, you are ready to export your labels. To export, click on “Export Labels” button on the top-right of the page, select your desired output format and click “Export” .

With these simple steps, you have now annotated your dataset and are ready to train your machine learning model.

A few things you need to keep in mind when using this tool:

1. MakeSense is an online web tool. That means, you will need to load all your images to the web portal to annotate it.
2. MakeSense does not provide an option to upload zip files. You will have to upload by selecting all images you desire to annotate.
3. MakeSense does not provide a way to save your annotation projects in between. That means, if you refresh your web browser, intentionally or by mistake, all your annotation progress is gone and you will have to start from the beginning (uploading all images).
4. You cannot collaborate with your team to work on same annotation project.
5. You can use AI to help speedup your image annotation task. You can select for two options: COCO SSD object detection model for bounding-box annotation, POSE-NET pose estimation for key-point annotation. Note that, to use AI, you need to select this option before beginning the project. Once you select not to use AI model for help, you cannot change it.

Considering the above points, MakeSense is a good option to use when you have up-to a few hundred images to annotate as in the open/closed door example. As no setup or installation is required, this tool can become very handy, when you have a small dataset, that you can label in one go. You can upload the images for open doors, annotate it and export the labels.

If one image contains two doors, and you use bounding-box annotation, On an average, you can annotate 10 images in 1 minute. In an hour, you can annotate approximately 600 images using this tool.

If you have a large dataset, say 10,000 images, I would recommend to look at other offline annotation tools (if you are working alone), or online annotation tools (if you are working on a team), which has the option to pause and resume the annotation tasks. Another option is to outsource the image annotation task to other companies, who specialise in this.