The VGG Image Annotator (VIA)

Manual image annotation, such as defining and labelling regions of interest, is a fundamental processing stage of many research projects and industrial applications. In this paper, we introduce a simple and standalone manual image annotation tool: the VGG Image Annotator (\href{this http URL}{VIA}). This is a light weight, standalone and offline software package that does not require any installation or setup and runs solely in a web browser. Due to its lightness and flexibility, the VIA software has quickly become an essential and invaluable research support tool in many academic disciplines. Furthermore, it has also been immensely popular in several industrial sectors which have invested in adapting this open source software to their requirements. Since its public release in 2017, the VIA software has been used more than $500,000$ times and has nurtured a large and thriving open source community.

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