Bounding box annotation is a time-consuming and tedious task that requires annotators to create annotations that tightly fit an object’s boundaries. Bounding box annotation tasks, for example, require annotators to ensure that all edges of an annotated object are enclosed in the annotation. In practice, creating annotations that are precise and well-aligned to object edges is a laborious process.

In this post, we introduce a new interactive tool called Snapper, powered by a machine learning (ML) model that reduces the effort required of annotators. The Snapper tool automatically adjusts noisy annotations, reducing the time required to annotate data at a high-quality level.

Overview of Snapper

Snapper is an interactive and intelligent system that automatically “snaps” object annotations to image-based objects in real time. With Snapper, annotators place bounding box annotations by drawing boxes, and then see immediate and automatic adjustments to their bounding box to better fit the bounded object.

The Snapper system is composed of two subsystems. The first subsystem is a front-end ReactJS component that intercepts annotation-related mouse events and handles the rendering of the model’s predictions. We integrate this front end with our Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth annotation UI. The second subsystem consists of the model backend, which receives requests from the front-end client, routes the requests to an ML model to generate adjusted bounding box coordinates, and sends the data back to the client.

ML model optimized for annotators

A tremendous number of high-performing object detection models have been proposed by the computer vision community in recent years. However, these state-of-the-art models are typically optimized for unguided object detection. To facilitate Snapper’s “snapping” functionality for adjusting users’ annotations, the input to our model is an initial bounding box, provided by the annotator, which can serve as a marker for the presence of an object. Furthermore, because the system has no intended object class it aims to support, Snapper’s adjustment model should be object-agnostic such that the system performs well on a range of object classes.

In general, these requirements diverge substantially from the use cases of typical ML object detection models. We note that the traditional object detection problem is formulated as “detect the object center, then regress the dimensions.” This is counterintuitive, because accurate predictions of bounding box edges rely crucially on first finding an accurate box center, and then trying to establish scalar distances to edges. Moreover, it doesn’t provide good confidence estimates that focus on the uncertainties of the edge locations, because only the classifier score is available for use.

To give our Snapper model the ability to adjust users’ annotations, we design and implement an ML model custom designed for bounding box adjustment. As input, the model takes an image and a corresponding bounding box annotation. The model extracts features from the image using a convolutional neural network. Following feature extraction, directional spatial pooling is applied to each dimension to aggregate the information needed to identify an appropriate edge location.

We formulate location prediction for bounding boxes as a classification problem over different locations. While seeing the whole object, we ask the machine to reason about the presence or absence of an edge directly at each pixel’s location as a classification task. This improves accuracy, as the reasoning for each edge uses image features from the immediate local neighborhood. Moreover, the scheme decouples the reasoning between different edges, which prevents unambiguous edge locations from being affected by the uncertain ones. Additionally, it provides us with edge-wise intuitive confidence estimates, as our model considers each edge of the object independently (like human annotators would) and provides an interpretable distribution (or uncertainty estimate) for each edge’s location. This allows us to highlight less confident edges for more efficient and precise human review.

Benchmarking and evaluating the Snapper tool

In practice, we find that the Snapper tool streamlines the bounding box annotation task and is very intuitive for users to pick up. We also conducted a quantitative analysis of Snapper to characterize the tool objectively. We evaluated Snapper’s adjustment model using a type of evaluation standard to object detection models that employs two measures to examine validity: Intersection over Union (IoU), and edge and corner deviance. IoU calculates the alignment between two annotations by dividing the annotations’ area of overlap by the annotations’ area of union, yielding a metric that ranges from 0–1. Edge deviance and corner deviance are calculated by taking the fraction of edges and corners that deviate from the ground truth by a pixel value.

To evaluate Snapper, we dynamically generated noisy annotation data by randomly adjusting the COCO ground truth bounding box coordinates with jitter. Our procedure for adding jitter first shifts the center of the bounding box by up to 10% of the corresponding bounding box dimension on each axis and then rescales the dimensions of the bounding box by a randomly sampled ratio between 0.9–1.1. Here, we apply these metrics to the validation set from the official MS-COCO dataset used for training. We specifically calculate the fraction of bounding boxes with IoU exceeding 90% alongside the fraction of edge deviations and corner deviations that deviate less than one or three pixels from the corresponding ground truth. The following table summarizes our findings.

As shown in the preceding table, Snapper’s adjustment model significantly improved the two sources of noisy data across each of the three metrics. With an emphasis on high precision annotations, we observe that applying Snapper to the jittered MS COCO dataset increases the fraction of bounding boxes with IoU exceeding 90% by upwards of 40%.

Conclusion

In this post, we introduced a new ML-powered annotation tool called Snapper. Snapper consists of a SageMaker model backend as well as a front-end component that we integrate into the Ground Truth labeling UI. We evaluated Snapper on simulated noisy bounding box annotations and found that it can successfully refine imperfect bounding boxes. The use of Snapper in labeling tasks can significantly reduce cost and increase accuracy.

To learn more, visit Amazon SageMaker Data Labeling and schedule a consultation today.

About the authors

Jonathan Buck is a Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services working at the intersection of machine learning and distributed systems. His work involves productionizing machine learning models and developing novel software applications powered by machine learning to put the latest capabilities in the hands of customers.

Alex Williams is an applied scientist in the human-in-the-loop science team at AWS AI where he conducts interactive systems research at the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI) and machine learning. Before joining Amazon, he was a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee where he co-directed the People, Agents, Interactions, and Systems (PAIRS) research laboratory. He has also held research positions at Microsoft Research, Mozilla Research, and the University of Oxford. He regularly publishes his work at prem

Min Bai is an applied scientist at AWS, with a current specialization in 2D / 3D computer vision, with a focus on the fields of autonomous driving and user-friendly AI tools. When not at work, he enjoys exploring nature, especially off the beaten track.

Kumar Chellapilla is a General Manager and Director at Amazon Web Services and leads the development of ML/AI Services such as human-in-loop systems, AI DevOps, Geospatial ML, and ADAS/Autonomous Vehicle development. Prior to AWS, Kumar was a Director of Engineering at Uber ATG and Lyft Level 5 and led teams using machine learning to develop self-driving capabilities such as perception and mapping. He also worked on applying machine learning techniques to improve search, recommendations, and advertising products at LinkedIn, Twitter, Bing, and Microsoft Research.

Patrick Haffner is a Principal Applied Scientist with the AWS Sagemaker Ground Truth team. He has been working on human-in-the-loop optimization since 1995, when he applied the LeNet Convolutional Neural Network to check recognition. He is interested in holistic approaches where ML algorithms and labeling UIs are optimized together to minimize the labeling cost.

Erran Li is the applied science manager at humain-in-the-loop services, AWS AI, Amazon. His research interests are 3D deep learning, and vision and language representation learning. Previously he was a senior scientist at Alexa AI, the head of machine learning at Scale AI and the chief scientist at Pony.ai. Before that, he was with the perception team at Uber ATG and the machine learning platform team at Uber working on machine learning for autonomous driving, machine learning systems and strategic initiatives of AI. He started his career at Bell Labs and was adjunct professor at Columbia University. He co-taught tutorials at ICML’17 and ICCV’19, and co-organized several workshops at NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ICCV on machine learning for autonomous driving, 3D vision and robotics, machine learning systems and adversarial machine learning. He has a PhD in computer science at Cornell University. He is an ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow.

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