Manual and semi-automated tools

Hasty offers a wide variety of manual and semi-automated tools to get you started with your annotation efforts. Depending on your project, different tools might be preferable. More on this here.
Let's start by reviewing our manual tools.
Manual tools
These are tools are all available when you start a new project. They offer no assistance or AI functionality.
​Bounding box​
This tool is used to create bounding boxes in two clicks. It is only used when working on object detection annotation tasks.
​Polygon​
The polygon tool is used to create polygons with 2 or more clicks. It is mainly used for instance segmentation but can be used for semantic segmentation and panoptic segmentation sometimes.
​Brush (and eraser)​
The brush allows you to draw shapes as you would when using a graphical editing software (Microsoft Paint or Photoshop, for example). It can be used for any type of segmentation annotation task.
​Image tags​
Image tags are what we call a single classification added to an image. It is only used when working on image classification tasks.
​Label attributes​
Label attributes are additional pieces of information concerning an annotation beyond the class. For example, you might have labeled an apple, but you also want to know which type of apple it is, and what its "freshness" is. For this, we use attributes. Think about attributes as a way to add additional metadata to your annotations.
Semi-automated tools
Semi-automated tools are also available from the start of any project. These tools use pre-trained AI models to speed up annotation from the first image.
​DEXTR​
DEXTR is an AI-powered tool where you put in the north, east, south, and west extreme points of an object you want to annotate. The AI model will then look for a shape between those points. It is mainly used for instance segmentation, but can also be used for semantic and panoptic segmentation.
​ATOM Segmenter​
ATOM is an AI-powered segmentation tool that allows you to annotate in one click. Simply click in the middle of the area/object you want to annotate. Get a suggestion back. Then, you can manipulate the suggestion by adding more clicks. In our testing, we found that we could do complex annotations in 2-5 clicks on average.
​Box to Instance​
Box to Instance is a bit of an outlier as it is a tool for converting bounding boxes to instances. It does so by taking any bounding boxes present on an image and then look for shapes inside of those boxes. Its main utility is to assist you if you want to migrate a project from object detection to instance segmentation or panoptic segmentation.
Important other functionalities
​Convert mask <-> polygon​
In some cases, you might want to convert polygons to masks or vice versa. We have built functionality for those cases.
​Merging two or more annotations into one​
In other cases, you might find yourself with many annotations that should be one, uniform, one. For this, we have merge functionality.
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