A Web-based System for Collaborative Annotation of Large Image and Video Collections

Annotated collections of images and videos are a necessary basis for the successful development of multimedia retrieval systems. The underlying models of such systems rely heavily on quality and availability of large training collections. The annotation of large collections, however, is a time-consuming and error prone task as it has to be performed by human annotators. In this paper we present the IBM Efficient Video Annotation (EVA) system, a server-based tool for semantic concept annotation of large video and image collections. It is optimised for collaborative annotation and includes features such as workload sharing and support in conducting inter-annotator analysis. We discuss initial results of an ongoing user-evaluation of this system. The results are based on data collected during the 2005 TRECVID Annotation Forum, where more than 100 annotators have been using the system.