# The VIA Annotation Software for Images, Audio and Video

## TL;DR

The VIA Annotation Software is a lightweight, browser-based tool for manual annotation of images, audio, and video, supporting spatial and temporal labeling, export, and collaborative annotation, suitable for academic and commercial use.

## Contribution

It introduces a simple, standalone, offline annotation tool that requires no installation and supports collaborative annotation, enhancing usability and accessibility.

## Key findings

- Supports annotation of images, audio, and video in a single tool.
- Exports annotations in JSON and CSV formats.
- Open source under BSD license.

## 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.