VGG Image Annotator (VIA) is a simple and standalone manual image annotation software. 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.
We have created self contained demo to illustrate the usage of VIA. These demo have been preloaded with some sample images. 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 VIA.
- Basic Image Annotation Demo
- Face Annotation Demo
- Remote Image Annotation Demo
- Face Track Annotation Demo
Detailed instructions for download of VIA3 are available at http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/software/via/
- User Guide : this can be accessed from the menubar "Help -> Getting Started"
- Face Track Annotation
- Setting up a project containing remotely hosted images
- A blog post describing VIA and its 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 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.
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"
}
Please send all pull requests for a specific version (e.g. via-2.x.y) to their respective branch (e.g. branch via-2.x.y). All contributions made to VIA code repository will be licensed under the BSD-2 clause license.
The VIA application is made up of the following three files:
- index.html : defines the user interface components like menu bar, toolbar, annotation editor, shape selector, file list, etc.
- via.css : describes the style (e.g. colour, font size, border, etc.) of user interface components defined in index.html.
- via.js : Javascript code that manages user interactions (e.g. draw regions, select region shape, etc.) and other aspects of the VIA application (e.g. load file, import/export annotations, edit metadata, etc.)
The above three files are combined by pack_via.py script to generate the final VIA application file named via.html.
More details about the VIA source code is available in the source code documentation file. All the files related to the VIA application reside in the via-2.x.y branch of the source code repository. The Quality Assessment page describes the guidelines to ensure the quality of VIA application, source code and its documentation.
Software bug reports and feature requests should be submitted here (requires gitlab account).
VIA is an open source project released under the BSD-2 clause license.
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 )