Editing annotations

[mpizenberg]

In the current state, annotations are not editable. The only option is to remove the most recent annotation of a given tool to redo it. This makes this application usable but can be very frustrating in different cases such that:

• Slightly moving a bounding box
• Adjusting points of a polygonal contour
• Adding a comment to an annotation
• Deleting an old annotation without deleting all newer

The purpose of this application is not to become an image manipulation program. So we should keep the interactive capabilities to a minimum and only provide those improving our ability to reach our goal -> Image annotations for dataset creation made easy. Providing editing capabilities is not an easy task though, so this will be carefully studied before any implementation is added to this application.

[mpizenberg]

Please share concrete use cases in this issue to help figure out which of those can be improved.

[mpizenberg]

From ACM MM18 review:

The annotation can be more accurate if the annotation can be finely modified, e.g., the ears part of the cat in the image.

[MiaoDX]

Yeap, I have no clear idea for the difficulty for this addition, there should be lots of consideration and maybe tricks involved, BUT this will make this tool really attractive instead of interesting(at least for me, as a user or a potential contributor).

SO, unless the addition will broke all the existing design mechanism (the state machine design or others?), I will certainly vote YES for this feature request!

[mpizenberg]

Thanks @MiaoDX for your comment! could you share in more details which editing capabilities matter to you? Like which tool, what kind of editions, etc. Any work toward editing capabilities should be more useful than harmful so it really matters that we know what are the use cases of people interested in this.

[MiaoDX]

Hi, last month I did some tweaking to labelme and make it able to change existing labels with customizable properties in my intern, see my fork of lableme (the doc is none, so not so much useful info there). Anyway, I did not mean that this tool should do that specific thing, it is just a prove that there is potential commercial usage/demand for an easy to use/extend labeling tool.

And since it is impossible to satisfy everybody's taste, like there will always be some demand of output labels for different formats (like COCO or MOT or any other), but these demands maybe better implemented by the user as a post-processing.

However, the lines you listed above are enough to attractive the community to come over and see if they can do something (even considering the potential learning curve of Elm language).

So, please consider adding the functions you listed above first and let us see what will happen then, and the Adding a comment to an annotation maybe of lower urgency or maybe it means customizable property as I mentioned above, e.g. if the object EASY/NORMAL/HARD to distinguish (for object detection task)?

Oookay, it is too long to be useful. Any further communication is welcomed, Good luck!