VGG Image Annotator version 1 is an early version of VIA which is still useful for basic image annotation tasks. 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 300 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.
Detailed instructions for download of VIA are available at http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/software/via/
We have created self contained demo to illustrate the usage of VIA3. These demo have been preloaded with some sample audio and video files. Furthermore, we have also added some sample manual annotations to these demo. These demo applications are very useful to get familiar with the commonly used features of VIA3.
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 May 2019, the VIA software has been used more than 600,000 times (+150,000 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.
For development, via.js contains the Javascript source code and index.html contains the HTML and CSS. The shell script pack_via.sh packs the VIA application into a single and standalone application file via.html containing the Javascript, HTML and CSS.
- Source code
- Source code documentation
- Contributing Guidelines
- Unit Tests
- tests/via_test_fileio.js : tests for import/export of annotations
- tests/via_test_region.js : tests for region create, move, delete operations
The Quality Assessment page describes the guidelines to ensure the quality of VIA application, source code and its documentation.
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 Abhishek Dutta for any queries or feedback related to this application.
This work is supported by EPSRC programme grant Seebibyte: Visual Search for the Era of Big Data ( EP/M013774/1 )