Top 15 Tools for Data Labelling & Annotation

Data annotation is the process of labelling images, video frames, audio, and text data that is mainly used in supervised machine learning to train the datasets that help a machine to understand the input and act accordingly. There are many types of annotations, some of them being - bounding boxes, polyline annotation, landmark annotation, semantic segmentation, polygon annotation, key points, 3D point cloud annotations, named entity recognition, etc.

With the advancements in deep learning algorithms, computer vision and NLP have greatly evolved and done wonders around the world of AI. Along with this AutoML has also grown. This has led many industries to adopt AI smoothly and make efficient use of it in various use cases.

There are many tools readily available for data annotation which can be utilised. Professional data annotators and labellers verify the annotations. Many of their platforms even offer end to end machine learning services from data loading, preprocessing, cleaning, data analysis/visualization, to deployment, production, and re-engineering. They also allow team coordination and management along with job assignments to each role. 

Top Data Annotations Tools

In this article, I’ll be discussing these tools and at the end, there is a comprehensive table for guidance to services and solutions provided by each.

1. SuperAnnotate

SuperAnnotate is an AI-powered image and video annotation platform. It has a partnership with OpenCV for its desktop version. 

• Allows users to create high-quality training datasets providing annotations for computer vision tasks.
• Design projects work and distribute tasks among teams.
• Building large projects at scale.
• Using active learning to accurately annotate images.
• Annotations automation for predefined classes.
• Transfer learning to predict new classes.
• Use of QA automation to detect mislabeled annotations.
• Viewing analytics to keep track of annotation speed, quality. 

To know more visit -> SuperAnnotate 

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2. LabelBox

Labelbox is an enterprise-grade platform providing solutions for training data with AI-enabled labeling tools for both image and text data, enabling labeling automation, integrating the human workforce, and data management. Has accessibility to a powerful API, along with Python SDK for extensibility.

• Best suited for commercial solutions with the features for creating and maintaining high-quality training data.
• Labeling tools for images, video text, and geospatial data.
• A standardized way for organizations to collaborate on the creation, manage, and review of data.
• Automation labeling to reduce costs, enhance the speed with QA.
• The external labeling service to support and maintain data quality with an internal labeling team.

To know more visit -> LabelBox 

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3. Playment

Playment helps ML teams build high-quality training data with ML-assisted tools, structured project management systems, expert human workforce, and much more. Provides solutions in image, video, and sensor annotation along with API integration to ML pipelines, and GT Studio. 

• Has the best-in-class annotations for Lidar and Radar.
• A standardized way to manage high-quality training data for computer vision tasks.
• Has a Ground-truth Studio to serve data labeling for creating diverse, high-quality ground truth datasets at scale 
• Streamline data pipelines to enable faster development of AI systems.
• Auto-scaling Workforce.
• Provisions for customized use cases.

To know more visit -> Playment

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4. Clarifai

Clarifai is one of the leading data annotation platforms providing developers, data scientists, and enterprises with deep learning tools to build entire AI lifecycles for various products and use-cases. 

• Workflow management
• API integration
• Wide range of computer vision and NLP tasks across various industries
• Provisions for custom and pre-trained AI models
• Nominal pricing as per usage
• Scalable deployment
• User-friendly UI/UX
• Quality assurance by professionals

To know more visit -> Clarifai

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5. Datasaur

Datasaur is one of the best text annotation platforms providing AI-based solutions to extract, analyze, maintain, and modify text data.

• Datasaur uses NLP along with other ML-assisted tools to build high-quality training text data.
• Can detect misclassified content using automation tools
• Provide summarization and analysis
• Free usage up to 5000 labels per month with 100MB storage
• Optimized labeling interface, Fully programmatic project creation and export via API, Regular Expression extension, Automatic file converter, Data validation, and review.
• Team Management, Performance Dashboard, Data Privacy, Cloud sync  

To know more visit -> Datasaur

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6. Lightly

Lightly uses one of the eminent deep learning algorithms called self-supervised learning techniques to enhance data labeling. It can improve ML models with its tools for data preparation and curation for vision data. 

• Can perform image classification and image segmentation
• On-premise Docker service to store, manage and work efficiently
• Has both web app and Python API interfaces
• Build on top of PyTorch library.
• Performance measures of datasets through graph analysis
• Active feedback and support
• Free services up to 5000 private and 25000 public images

To know more visit -> Lightly

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7. Hive

Hive provides enterprise AI solutions for industry-specific use-cases. Used in both computer vision and NLP tasks. Hive believes in an AI-as-a service platform. 

• Data labelling by categorizing
• Entire workflow management with constant feedback and support until the final production
• Hive predict is Model-as-a-service providing predictions on visuals, audio, and text data
• Training data is customizable, flexible, and built with proper high-quality assurance. 

To know more visit -> Hive

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8. Lionbridge

Lionbridge deals with all kinds of data Image, Video, Audio, Text, and Geospatial data for providing annotation and labeling services. It is one of the oldest companies in the market. 

• Its text annotation has multilingual services covering many languages across the globe.
• Provides entire service from data collection to validation.
• Has open access to 300+ datasets
• Follows human-in-loop annotation format by crowdsourcing
• AI consulting 
• Partnered and trusted by fortune 500 companies

To know more visit -> Lionbridge

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9. V7 Darwin

V7 labs had launched V& darwin platform for data annotation and data labeling purposes. Darwin makes use of deep learning algorithms to generate state-of-the-art high- quality ground truth datasets.

• End to end services for computer vision tasks.
• Automated image annotation
• Use of active learning for training datasets
• Allows team collaboration and data visualization
• API and CLI tools availability along with Python SDK
• Complete model training pipeline
• Quality Review during the entire product lifecycle 

To know more visit -> V7 Darwin

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10. Amazon Sagemaker Ground Truth

AWS as we all know is a leading cloud service provider. Amazon Sagemaker Ground Truth is one of its products used for data labeling to generate ground truth datasets using the machine learning platform Amazon Sagemaker.

• Sagemaker GT can be integrated with Amazon Mechanical Turk
• Labelling goes through various processes assisted labelling by external and internal labellers
• Label verification, adjustment, and validation
• Flexible pricing
• Datasets are stored in S3(Amazon simple storage service) buckets
• Amazon CLI to download the annotated dataset

To know more visit -> Amazon Sagemaker Ground Truth

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11. LightTag

LightTag is another text annotation platform providing faster NLP services.

• Allow designation allotments for various tasks distributions in data annotation
• Multilingual
• Performance dashboard for both data and annotators
• Evaluation metrics
• Automation
• Review & QA.

To know more visit -> LightTag

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12. Kili Technology

Kili technology covers all the multimedia data for annotation and labelling at industry-specific levels.

• computer vision (image, video) or on NLP (text, pdf, voice) topics
• Allowance for on-boarding business experts & external workforce to scale projects.
• simple collaboration, quality control, data management, and labeling workforce
• Available online or on-premise
• ML with active learning, online learning, and semi-supervised learning
• Python Client GraphQL API

To know more visit -> Kili Technology

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13. Dataturks

Dataturks is an AI startup later acquired by Walmart Labs. It helps developers and researchers in annotating an image, video, and text data.

• Open source datasets are available
• Generates real-time reports
• Enables crowdsourcing
• Has open-sourced GitHub repo
• Software support in Linux and Windows
• Complete API service to upload, process, and download data

To know more visit -> Dataturks

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14. TagTog

TagTog is another self-supervised text annotation tool.

• NLP modeling
• Text analytics, visualization, and annotation
• SMEs with domain-specific insights
• Provides moderation and customization
• Access to pre-annotated data 
• Multilingual
• Unicode support
• Multiple format support ( PDF, CSV, etc) 
• Python and JavaScript API

To know more visit -> tagtog

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15. LinkedAI

LinkedAI is a no-code AI-assisted mostly for computer vision annotation platform but also offers NLP services.

• Data labelling, and Data tagging 
• generating synthetic data
• Quality checks by professionals
• Auto labelling services
• Crowdsourcing
• Annotations available in JSON and CSV

To know more visit -> LINKEDAI

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Choose The suitable Data Annotator Tool

Tool Name	Services Provided/Tools	Solutions/ Use Cases
SuperAnnotate	Image & VideoBounding boxes, Polylines, polygons, Cuboid, Ellipse, Line, Point	Aerial Imaging, Autonomous Driving, Retail, Security & Surveillance, Medical, Robotics.
LabelBox	Image, Video, Text, Geospatial data.bounding box, Points, superpixel, brush, eraser, polylines, Polygons, NER	Document data extraction, manufacturing, health, insurance, aerial, agriculture, transportation
Playment	Image, Video, Sensor2D & 3Dbounding box, polygons, cuboid, polylines, landmark, semantic & point cloud segmentation, 2D-3D object linking	Autonomous Vehicles, Human Pose Estimation and Tracking, Security surveillance, insurance, fashion, gaming, agriculture
Clarifai	Image, Video, Text.Single and Multilabel  classification, bounding box, polyline, video tracking, NER, OCR, text moderation	E-commerce, hospitality, document analysis, user content monitoring, chatbots, aviation, tourism, OTT platforms, insurance, public sector, brick & mortar
Datasaur	Named Entity Recognition, Part-of-speech, Coreference Resolution,Dependency Resolution,Document Labelling, OCR	Finance, Healthcare, Legal, Media, E-commerce
Lightly	Image and VideoData augmentation, semantic segmentation	Autonomous Vehicles, Visual Inspection, Medical Imagery, Geospatial Data
Hive	Image, audio, video, textbounding boxes, polygons, semantic segmentation, cuboids, key points, lines, principal axes rotation, timestamp, contours, transcriptions	Logo identification, content moderation, document parsing, retail, advertisement, automotive, hospitality, speech to text,
Lionbridge	2D & 3D  bounding boxes, cuboids, Image Classification/Image Categorization, Landmark Annotation, Pixel-precise / Pixel-wise Segmentation, Polygons, Semantic Segmentation, Grammar and Spelling, Machine translation Quality Assurance, Indent Variation	AR/VR, Drones and aerial imagery, Autonomous Vehicles, Car infotainment, Face Recognition, Medical Imagery, Video Data analysis, Social Media, Robotics, Analytics and visualization.Sentiment analysis, entity extraction, Automatic Speech Recognition, Voice assistants, Text-to-Speech, pronunciation dictionary creation, Sales Call Analysis, Point of interest tagging, address verification, car and pedestrian routing,
V7 Darwin	Image & Videopolygon, brush and eraser, bounding boxes, key points, line, ellipse, cuboid, classification tags, attributes, instance tags, directional vectors	Vision AI for visually impaired, Retail, life sciences,  environment, manufacturing.
Amazon Sagemaker GT	Image, Video and textImage Classification, Object Detection, and Semantic Segmentation, multi-frame object classification,  object tracking, and video clip classification, 3D point clouds, Entity extraction	autonomous vehicles,  product descriptions, movie reviews or sentiment analysis
LightTag	textSpan Annotation,Entity Annotations, Relationships Annotation.Phrase and Subword Annotations, Document Metadata, Pre-Annotations, Keyboard Shortcuts.	Document Classifications, Document Tagging, Very Long Class Lists, Guidelines,Auto Save, Search.Finance, legal, medical.
Kili Technology	Image, video, audio and textpoints, polyline, polygon, bounding boxes, and segmentationobject detection, OCR, entity extraction	Image classification, Medical Imagery, Audio transcription, Conversational Bot
Dataturks	Image, video and textimage classification and segmentation, object detection using polygons and bounding boxes, OCR, Document Annotation, Sublabels, NER, PoS	Text Summarization, Content Moderation, Image Label generation
TagTog	Textentity extraction, entity normalisation, concept search, Big Texts, annotated corpus, semantic search, text mining,	Chatbot Training, business intelligence, and CRM data enrichment
LinkedAI	Image, Video & textbounding boxes, polygons, lines, semantic segmentation and landmarks	Image categorization, automation vehicle, face recognition systems