An Assistive Learning Workflow on Annotating Images for Object Detection

Published

December 9, 2019

Author(s)

Vivian W. Wong, Max K. Ferguson, Kincho H. Law, Yung-Tsun Lee

Abstract

We present an end-to-end workflow to generate annotated image datasets for object detection. With this workflow, which we call assistive learning, we are able to reduce manual annotation time on two experimental datasets by 79.4% and 83.1%. The experimental results of this work show three contributions of the assistive learning workflow: (1) Savings on human annotation time; (2) generalizability to variable dataset sizes, domains and convolutional neural network (CNN) models; and (3) faster CNN training with limited amount of labeled data using a novel contextual sampling method, thereby a reduction in human workload early on in the assistive learning process. In addition, we wrap the workflow in an interactive annotation interface, allowing annotators without any machine learning experience to speed up the annotation process for training the CNN models.

Proceedings Title

2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data

Conference Dates

December 9-12, 2019

Conference Location

LA, CA, US

Pub Type

Conferences

Download Paper

Local Download

Keywords

data annotation workflow, computer vision, object detection, smart manufacturing, vehicle detection

Citation

Wong, V. , Ferguson, M. , Law, K. and Lee, Y. (2019), An Assistive Learning Workflow on Annotating Images for Object Detection, 2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, LA, CA, US, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=928783 (Accessed October 12, 2025)