Image annotation is the process of adding structure to an image, providing descriptions for different elements in that image. Image annotation can be used for a variety of purposes, such as solving a visual problem more efficiently or improving the accuracy of training data to teach an AI model. It can range from really simple tasks like labeling the type of tree in an image, to more complex tasks like labeling each product in a grocery store aisle.
Image annotations are commonly used in computer vision and other AI tasks, but they don't get much attention. By not having good image annotations, you're missing out on a lot of benefits that image annotations can provide. In fact, it's been shown by many researchers that having accurate image annotations can significantly improve machine learning results by providing large sets of training data or improving the accuracy of the data when "teaching" algorithms to recognize patterns better.
Image annotations are useful because they provide useful information to a machine learning task. However, the problem with image annotations is that many are not accurate or complete. An example of this is when humans annotate a picture of a dog, but the annotated image contains a dog with eyes in its head (a common caricature). This could cause problems for machine learning if an algorithm thinks that it's recognizing something that's supposed to be in the picture.
Why Do We Need To Correct Bad Annotations?
Being able to identify and correct bad annotations is important in several important areas: making data more accurate, improving performance of the model, and updating the overall quality of the annotation dataset. We want to do anything we can to make sure that our training data is actually useful and accurate.
Bad annotations are more common than you may think. Many researchers have published research about this, including datasets that are full of bad or nonsense annotations. One study compared the ability of humans to label an image as containing a horse against a computer's ability to label the same image as containing a horse, with the computer achieving an accuracy rate of 56% (humans had an accuracy rate of 92%). This shows that using a computer to make image annotations can be very inaccurate.
While this study looks at human annotations, it's important to note that humans are often trained using datasets that are not comprised of relevant data . For example, have you ever had a teacher say to you "do this exercise now and do it again next time"? This is called re-training the dataset and is something many AI engineers don't like to do. Re-training the dataset can be a very bad decision for your data and will decrease accuracy of your training data.
How Are Bad Annotations Created?
Bad annotations are created by humans when they label things or when they make errors in labeling something. Humans are often trained on inaccurate teaching datasets that are not relevant or complete. For example, a classroom may have one group of children labeled as children, another labeled as being a student, and another labeled as being an adult. If a computer is trained on this data, it may label 50% of the adults as adults, 10% of the children as being students, and 90% of the children as being students because these are the "only" labels that get labeled. This means that not only does it produce very inaccurate results every time an algorithm runs on this data, but it also wastes a lot of valuable data.
To make up for this wasted information, many computer vision researchers use overly detailed annotations. An example of this would be labeling an image with a large number of words designed to describe the contents of an image. This would help the computer recognize human info, but because many algorithms are set up so that they can't handle a large number of labels or words, it's usually just not used. However, these types of annotations can be very detailed and accurate if the person designing them knows quite a bit about what they're annotating.
The other drawback to this is that creating overly detailed annotations takes a lot of time, and it's likely that you won't spend the time at the same rate that you'll get accurate results. In other words, if you spend 3 hours creating an image annotation that has 7 labels and depth perception runs in about 1 day, then it's likely to take 14 days for your algorithm to recognize every label in the image. Needless to say, this is not something that's going to happen for most researchers.
How Can We Make Image Annotations More Accurate?
The best way to make image annotations more accurate is by using software that automatically locates and makes labels for objects, people, and other images in an image. This can be very time consuming, especially if the image has a lot of things, but it's a great way to get accurate data if you have the right tools.
Another good option is to find a reliable image annotation service provider. The main benefit of using a service like this is that you get to focus on other aspects of your research. You don't have to spend time manually making image annotations and you don't need to worry about whether or not the models will be able to recognize the different objects in your images.
High-quality and pixel-precision Image Annotation Service at Kotwel
Image Annotation can be a time-consuming and costly task. However, there are companies that offer image annotation service to customers who wish to have their images annotated quickly with a reasonable price. For example, Kotwel is one such company that can save you hours and costs on image annotation. At Kotwel, we can help you with data annotation tasks for text, image, video datasets. Get in touch with us below to learn more about our solutions and services.
Kotwel is a reliable data service provider in Vietnam, offering high-quality AI training data for machine learning and AI. It provides data services such as data collection, data annotation and data validation that help get more out of your algorithms by generating, labeling and validating unique and high-quality training data, specifically tailored to your needs.