Introduction to Roboflow Annotate

Annotate images for use in your computer vision projects.

Roboflow Annotate provides a fast, robust interface through which you can annotate images.

You can annotate images using bounding boxes and polygons.

Annotation Methods

You can annotate images by:

• Drawing bounding boxes and polygons manually

• Using Label Assist, a tool that uses model checkpoints (i.e. a previous version of your model) to recommend annotations

• Using Smart Polygon, a feature that creates polygon annotations with a few clicks.

• Using Label Assist with SAM, which uses the Segment Anything Model to create more precise polygon annotations with a few clicks.

Bounding Boxes vs. Polygons

With the option between drawing bounding boxes and polygons, you may wonder: what is the difference between these two annotation types?

Bounding boxes -- boxes drawn around an object of interest in an image -- are easier to draw than polygons, thus taking up less annotation time. Polygons, on the other hand, are more precise, and may lead to a slight increase in performance.

For segmentation tasks, you need to annotate images with polygons, as you are training your model to segment specific items from an image with precision.

This section of the Roboflow documentation shows how to annotate images using each of the above methods.