The VIA Annotation Software for Images, Audio and Video

TLDR

The paper introduces VIA, a simple, standalone manual annotation tool for images, audio, and video. VIA is a lightweight, offline web‑browser tool that lets annotators define spatial regions in images or video frames and temporal segments in audio or video, export annotations as JSON/CSV, and support collaborative annotation of large datasets. The software is released under a BSD license, enabling use in academic and commercial projects.

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a simple and standalone manual annotation tool for images, audio and video: the VGG Image Annotator (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. The VIA software allows human annotators to define and describe spatial regions in images or video frames, and temporal segments in audio or video. These manual annotations can be exported to plain text data formats such as JSON and CSV and therefore are amenable to further processing by other software tools. VIA also supports collaborative annotation of a large dataset by a group of human annotators. The BSD open source license of this software allows it to be used in any academic project or commercial application.