What is CVAT

CVAT stands for “Computer Vision Annotation Tool.

It is what we use to label and process images for the Ag Image Repository.

Opening CVAT

Logging into the CVAT Web Application

1. Open Google Chrome

2. Navigate to https://app.cvat.ai

3. Click Continue with Google to setup CVAT with your NCSU google account.

   1. If you do not have an NCSU email, you may either use a different method to login (i.e. GitHub, Personal Google Account, etc.) or click Create an Account to make a CVAT specific username and password.

4. Select your NCSU account (<unityid>@ncsu.edu)

   1. If your NCSU account is not appearing as an option select Use another account.

      1. In the Email or Phone field, enter <your unity id>@ncsu.edu

      2. On the Shibboleth Login Service page, enter your Unity ID and Password and select Log In.

      3. Authenticate with Duo if prompted

5. You will be asked “The information below would be shared with the service if you proceed. Do you agree to release this information to the service every time you access it”. Select Accept to continue.

6. You will be taken to the Tasks page of the CVAT web application.

7. Any time after the initial login, when you are logged in to your NCSU google account in Google Chrome, you will be automatically logged in upon opening CVAT.

Navigating CVAT

Key Terms

The CVAT interface opens by default onto the Tasks page. The interface is comprised of six different Pages each pertaining to a different aspect of the CVAT.

CVAT provides three levels of abstraction for annotation workflows: projects, tasks, and jobs.

• A job contains one or more images and can be assigned to a specific annotator or reviewer.

• A task defines the label schema to use for annotation and contains one or more jobs.

• A project contains multiple tasks of the same type grouped together under a shared label schema.

Although you will be utilizing all three of these organizational structures, the primary one you will be working with and configuring will be Projects.

A few other key terms used in CVAT are included below:

• A label is type of an annotated object (e.g. person, car, vehicle, etc.) For our purposes, labels will be used to distinguish different plant species .

• An annotation is a set of objects that are identified in an image or video whether by the user or by a computer model.

• A manual annotation is created by a person without the help of any models.

• A semi-automatic annotation is created mainly automatically by a model, but the user provides some data (e.g. interpolation). This is is the type of annotation we will be creating using the Segment Anything Model (SAM).

• An automatic annotation is created entirely by a computer model without any additional input by a person.

• A job’s state indicates how much progress has been made on a specific job and what point it is currently at. They include new, in progress, rejected, and completed.

Projects Page

The projects page is where users can create a new project, create a project from a backup, and also see their previously created projects. You will primarily be working with projects.

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Tasks Page

The tasks page is where to find separate tasks. They are sorted in creation order. For the purposes of our usage, you do not need to worry about tasks.

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Jobs Page

The jobs page is where users can see the jobs that are assigned to them without having access to the task page, as well as track progress, sort and apply filters to the job list. For the purposes of our usage, you do not need to worry about jobs.

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Cloud Storage Page

The cloud storage page is where you can “attach” specific cloud storages to CVAT directly (such as Google Cloud or Azure). We will not be utilizing cloud storage in CVAT.

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Requests Page

The requests page allows users to track the status of data processing jobs such as exporting annotations or importing datasets. It is also where error messages are logged.

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Models Page

The models page contains a list of Deep Learning (DL) models deployed for semi-automatic and automatic annotation. The Segment Anything Model (SAM) is shown on this page.

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Miscellaneous

Settings

Additional Documentation

An Important Note on Organizations and Account Types

Although CVAT is a free and open source software, using the web hosted application rather than a self-hosted serverless setup requires a CVAT account. The basic CVAT account is free but there are limitations imposed regarding the number of tasks a user can have, the number of images that can be annotated using computer models per month, the number of tasks per project and the usage of certain features and tools.

For the time being, we will only be utilizing free “Solo” accounts with the potential to upgrade to an Organizational account later. This means that data management is very important and users will need to periodically remove old completed projects. Please see the deleting a project section for more information.

Creating Projects

1. In the CVAT web application, go to the Projects page.

2. Click the Plus Symbol (+) button and select Create a new project from the callout

3. Copy the file name from the zip file that you downloaded from the CVAT Google Drive by clicking on the file name and pressing the Ctrl and C ( Ctrl + C ) keys on your keyboard simultaneously, or by right clicking the zip file and selecting Copy from the list that appears.

4. Paste the name into the Name field in CVAT by placing your cursor on the empty field and pressing the Ctrl and V ( Ctrl + V ) keys on your keyboard simultaneously or by right clicking and selecting Paste from the list that appears.

5. Click the end of the name that you just pasted and delete the file extension (.zip) from the name.

6. The project name should now be the same as the data file’s excluding the .zip

7. Press Submit & Open

8. You will be taken to the Project that you just created

Adding Datasets to Projects

Opening A Task

From the Projects Page

1. On the Projects page, click on the Project you are going to annotate

2. The project will contain a task titled “default” with a unique numerical identifier. This can be used in the tasks page to go directly to this specific task. Be careful as all tasks created by importing datasets into projects will be titled “default” regardless of whether they are in the same project or not.

3. Click Open

4. The task will contain a single job with its own unique numerical identifier. This can be used in the jobs page to go directly to this specific job.

5. Click on the job’s ID which is written in blue.

6. This will open the job in the CVAT annotation interface. See Working and Annotating in CVAT for information on how to annotate in CVAT.

Deleting a Project

From the Projects Page

1. On the Projects page, click on the Project you are going to delete

2. In the project the data corresponds to, click the Actions ⫶ button in the upper right section of the page.

3. Select Delete from the dropdown that appears

4. A prompt will appear asking you to confirm that you want to delete the project.

5. Click Continue

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