AI Assisted Annotation Tools Market Outlook

In 2023, the global AI assisted annotation tools market size was valued at approximately USD 600 million. Propelled by increasing demand for labeled data in machine learning and AI-driven applications, the market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 25% from 2024 to 2032, reaching an estimated market size of USD 3.3 billion by 2032. Factors such as advancements in AI technologies, an upsurge in data generation, and the need for accurate data labeling are fueling this growth.

The rapid proliferation of AI and machine learning (ML) has necessitated the development of robust data annotation tools. One of the key growth factors is the increasing reliance on AI for commercial and industrial applications, which require vast amounts of accurately labeled data to train AI models. Industries such as healthcare, automotive, and retail are heavily investing in AI technologies to enhance operational efficiencies, improve customer experience, and foster innovation. Consequently, the demand for AI-assisted annotation tools is expected to soar, driving market expansion.

Another significant growth factor is the growing complexity and volume of data generated across various sectors. With the exponential increase in data, the manual annotation process becomes impractical, necessitating automated or semi-automated tools to handle large datasets efficiently. AI-assisted annotation tools offer a solution by improving the speed and accuracy of data labeling, thereby enabling businesses to leverage AI capabilities more effectively. This trend is particularly pronounced in sectors like IT and telecommunications, where data volumes are immense.

Furthermore, the rise of personalized and precision medicine in healthcare is boosting the demand for AI-assisted annotation tools. Accurate data labeling is crucial for developing advanced diagnostic tools, treatment planning systems, and patient management solutions. AI-assisted annotation tools help in labeling complex medical data sets, such as MRI scans and histopathological images, ensuring high accuracy and consistency. This demand is further amplified by regulatory requirements for data accuracy and reliability in medical applications, thereby driving market growth.

The evolution of the Image Annotation Tool has been pivotal in addressing the challenges posed by the increasing complexity of data. These tools have transformed the way industries handle data, enabling more efficient and accurate labeling processes. By automating the annotation of images, these tools reduce the time and effort required to prepare data for AI models, particularly in fields like healthcare and automotive, where precision is paramount. The integration of AI technologies within these tools allows for continuous learning and improvement, ensuring that they can adapt to the ever-changing demands of data annotation. As a result, businesses can focus on leveraging AI capabilities to drive innovation and enhance operational efficiencies.

From a regional perspective, North America remains the dominant player in the AI-assisted annotation tools market, primarily due to the early adoption of AI technologies and significant investments in AI research and development. The presence of major technology companies and a robust infrastructure for AI implementation further bolster this dominance. However, the Asia Pacific region is expected to witness the highest CAGR during the forecast period, driven by increasing digital transformation initiatives, growing investments in AI, and expanding IT infrastructure.

Component Analysis

The AI-assisted annotation tools market is segmented into software and services based on components. The software segment holds a significant share of the market, primarily due to the extensive deployment of annotation software across various industries. These software solutions are designed to handle diverse data types, including text, image, audio, and video, providing a comprehensive suite of tools for data labeling. The continuous advancements in AI algorithms and machine learning models are driving the development of more sophisticated annotation software, further enhancing their accuracy and efficiency.

Within the software segment, there is a growing trend towards the integration of AI and machine learning capabilities to automate the annotation process. This integration reduces the dependency on manual efforts, significantly improving the speed and s

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Data Labeling And Annotation Tools Market Size 2025-2029

The data labeling and annotation tools market size is forecast to increase by USD 2.69 billion at a CAGR of 28% between 2024 and 2029.

The market is experiencing significant growth, driven by the explosive expansion of generative AI applications. As AI models become increasingly complex, there is a pressing need for specialized platforms to manage and label the vast amounts of data required for training. This trend is further fueled by the emergence of generative AI, which demands unique data pipelines for effective training. However, this market's growth trajectory is not without challenges. Maintaining data quality and managing escalating complexity pose significant obstacles. ML models are being applied across various sectors, from fraud detection and sales forecasting to speech recognition and image recognition.
Ensuring the accuracy and consistency of annotated data is crucial for AI model performance, necessitating robust quality control measures. Moreover, the growing complexity of AI systems requires advanced tools to handle intricate data structures and diverse data types. The market continues to evolve, driven by advancements in machine learning (ML), computer vision, and natural language processing. Companies seeking to capitalize on market opportunities must address these challenges effectively, investing in innovative solutions to streamline data labeling and annotation processes while maintaining high data quality.

What will be the Size of the Data Labeling And Annotation Tools Market during the forecast period?

Explore in-depth regional segment analysis with market size data - historical 2019-2023 and forecasts 2025-2029 - in the full report.
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The market is experiencing significant activity and trends, with a focus on enhancing annotation efficiency, ensuring data privacy, and improving model performance. Annotation task delegation and remote workflows enable teams to collaborate effectively, while version control systems facilitate model deployment pipelines and error rate reduction. Label inter-annotator agreement and quality control checks are crucial for maintaining data consistency and accuracy. Data security and privacy remain paramount, with cloud computing and edge computing solutions offering secure alternatives. Data privacy concerns are addressed through secure data handling practices and access controls. Model retraining strategies and cost optimization techniques are essential for adapting to evolving datasets and budgets. Dataset bias mitigation and accuracy improvement methods are key to producing high-quality annotated data.

Training data preparation involves data preprocessing steps and annotation guidelines creation, while human-in-the-loop systems allow for real-time feedback and model fine-tuning. Data validation techniques and team collaboration tools are essential for maintaining data integrity and reducing errors. Scalable annotation processes and annotation project management tools streamline workflows and ensure a consistent output. Model performance evaluation and annotation tool comparison are ongoing efforts to optimize processes and select the best tools for specific use cases. Data security measures and dataset bias mitigation strategies are essential for maintaining trust and reliability in annotated data.

How is this Data Labeling And Annotation Tools Industry segmented?

The data labeling and annotation tools industry research report provides comprehensive data (region-wise segment analysis), with forecasts and estimates in 'USD million' for the period 2025-2029, as well as historical data from 2019-2023 for the following segments.

Type

  Text
  Video
  Image
  Audio


Technique

  Manual labeling
  Semi-supervised labeling
  Automatic labeling


Deployment

  Cloud-based
  On-premises


Geography

  North America

    US
    Canada
    Mexico


  Europe

    France
    Germany
    Italy
    Spain
    UK


  APAC

    China


  South America

    Brazil


  Rest of World (ROW)

By Type Insights

The Text segment is estimated to witness significant growth during the forecast period. The data labeling market is witnessing significant growth and advancements, primarily driven by the increasing adoption of generative artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs). This segment encompasses various annotation techniques, including text annotation, which involves adding structured metadata to unstructured text. Text annotation is crucial for machine learning models to understand and learn from raw data. Core text annotation tasks range from fundamental natural language processing (NLP) techniques, such as Named Entity Recognition (NER), where entities like persons, organizations, and locations are identified and tagged, to complex requirements of modern AI.

Moreover,

The size of the Data Annotation Tool Market market was valued at USD 3.9 USD billion in 2023 and is projected to reach USD 6.64 USD billion by 2032, with an expected CAGR of 7.9% during the forecast period. A Data Annotation Tool is defined as the software that can be employed to make annotations to data hence helping a learning computer model learn patterns. These tools provide a way of segregating the data types to include images, texts, and audio, as well as videos. Some of the subcategories of annotation include images such as bounding boxes, segmentation, text such as entity recognition, sentiment analysis, audio such as transcription, sound labeling, and video such as object tracking. Other common features depend on the case but they commonly consist of interfaces, cooperation with others, suggestion of labels, and quality assurance. It can be used in the automotive industry (object detection for self-driving cars), text processing (classification of text), healthcare (medical imaging), and retail (recommendation). These tools get applied in training good quality, accurately labeled data sets for the engineering of efficient AI systems. Key drivers for this market are: Increasing Adoption of Cloud-based Managed Services to Drive Market Growth. Potential restraints include: Adverse Health Effect May Hamper Market Growth. Notable trends are: Growing Implementation of Touch-based and Voice-based Infotainment Systems to Increase Adoption of Intelligent Cars.

The Q-CAT (Querying-Supported Corpus Annotation Tool) is a tool for manual linguistic annotation of corpora, which also enables advanced queries on top of these annotations. The tool has been used in various annotation campaigns related to the ssj500k reference training corpus of Slovenian (http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1210), such as named entities, dependency syntax, semantic roles and multi-word expressions, but it can also be used for adding new annotation layers of various types to this or other language corpora. Q-CAT is a .NET application, which runs on Windows operating system. Version 1.1 enables the automatic attribution of token IDs and personalized font adjustments. Version 1.2 supports the CONLL-U format and working with UD POS tags. Version 1.3 supports adding new layers of annotation on top of CONLL-U (and then saving the corpus as XML TEI). Version 1.4 introduces new features in command line mode (filtering by sentence ID, multiple link type visualizations) Version 1.5 supports listening to audio recordings (provided in the # sound_url comment line in CONLL-U)

Leaves from genetically unique Juglans regia plants were scanned using X-ray micro-computed tomography (microCT) on the X-ray μCT beamline (8.3.2) at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA USA). Soil samples were collected in Fall of 2017 from the riparian oak forest located at the Russell Ranch Sustainable Agricultural Institute at the University of California Davis. The soil was sieved through a 2 mm mesh and was air dried before imaging. A single soil aggregate was scanned at 23 keV using the 10x objective lens with a pixel resolution of 650 nanometers on beamline 8.3.2 at the ALS. Additionally, a drought stressed almond flower bud (Prunus dulcis) from a plant housed at the University of California, Davis, was scanned using a 4x lens with a pixel resolution of 1.72 µm on beamline 8.3.2 at the ALS Raw tomographic image data was reconstructed using TomoPy. Reconstructions were converted to 8-bit tif or png format using ImageJ or the PIL package in Python before further processing. Images were annotated using Intel’s Computer Vision Annotation Tool (CVAT) and ImageJ. Both CVAT and ImageJ are free to use and open source. Leaf images were annotated in following Théroux-Rancourt et al. (2020). Specifically, Hand labeling was done directly in ImageJ by drawing around each tissue; with 5 images annotated per leaf. Care was taken to cover a range of anatomical variation to help improve the generalizability of the models to other leaves. All slices were labeled by Dr. Mina Momayyezi and Fiona Duong.To annotate the flower bud and soil aggregate, images were imported into CVAT. The exterior border of the bud (i.e. bud scales) and flower were annotated in CVAT and exported as masks. Similarly, the exterior of the soil aggregate and particulate organic matter identified by eye were annotated in CVAT and exported as masks. To annotate air spaces in both the bud and soil aggregate, images were imported into ImageJ. A gaussian blur was applied to the image to decrease noise and then the air space was segmented using thresholding. After applying the threshold, the selected air space region was converted to a binary image with white representing the air space and black representing everything else. This binary image was overlaid upon the original image and the air space within the flower bud and aggregate was selected using the “free hand” tool. Air space outside of the region of interest for both image sets was eliminated. The quality of the air space annotation was then visually inspected for accuracy against the underlying original image; incomplete annotations were corrected using the brush or pencil tool to paint missing air space white and incorrectly identified air space black. Once the annotation was satisfactorily corrected, the binary image of the air space was saved. Finally, the annotations of the bud and flower or aggregate and organic matter were opened in ImageJ and the associated air space mask was overlaid on top of them forming a three-layer mask suitable for training the fully convolutional network. All labeling of the soil aggregate and soil aggregate images was done by Dr. Devin Rippner. These images and annotations are for training deep learning models to identify different constituents in leaves, almond buds, and soil aggregates Limitations: For the walnut leaves, some tissues (stomata, etc.) are not labeled and only represent a small portion of a full leaf. Similarly, both the almond bud and the aggregate represent just one single sample of each. The bud tissues are only divided up into buds scales, flower, and air space. Many other tissues remain unlabeled. For the soil aggregate annotated labels are done by eye with no actual chemical information. Therefore particulate organic matter identification may be incorrect. Resources in this dataset:Resource Title: Annotated X-ray CT images and masks of a Forest Soil Aggregate. File Name: forest_soil_images_masks_for_testing_training.zipResource Description: This aggregate was collected from the riparian oak forest at the Russell Ranch Sustainable Agricultural Facility. The aggreagate was scanned using X-ray micro-computed tomography (microCT) on the X-ray μCT beamline (8.3.2) at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA USA) using the 10x objective lens with a pixel resolution of 650 nanometers. For masks, the background has a value of 0,0,0; pores spaces have a value of 250,250, 250; mineral solids have a value= 128,0,0; and particulate organic matter has a value of = 000,128,000. These files were used for training a model to segment the forest soil aggregate and for testing the accuracy, precision, recall, and f1 score of the model.Resource Title: Annotated X-ray CT images and masks of an Almond bud (P. Dulcis). File Name: Almond_bud_tube_D_P6_training_testing_images_and_masks.zipResource Description: Drought stressed almond flower bud (Prunis dulcis) from a plant housed at the University of California, Davis, was scanned by X-ray micro-computed tomography (microCT) on the X-ray μCT beamline (8.3.2) at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA USA) using the 4x lens with a pixel resolution of 1.72 µm using. For masks, the background has a value of 0,0,0; air spaces have a value of 255,255, 255; bud scales have a value= 128,0,0; and flower tissues have a value of = 000,128,000. These files were used for training a model to segment the almond bud and for testing the accuracy, precision, recall, and f1 score of the model.Resource Software Recommended: Fiji (ImageJ),url: https://imagej.net/software/fiji/downloads Resource Title: Annotated X-ray CT images and masks of Walnut leaves (J. Regia) . File Name: 6_leaf_training_testing_images_and_masks_for_paper.zipResource Description: Stems were collected from genetically unique J. regia accessions at the 117 USDA-ARS-NCGR in Wolfskill Experimental Orchard, Winters, California USA to use as scion, and were grafted by Sierra Gold Nursery onto a commonly used commercial rootstock, RX1 (J. microcarpa × J. regia). We used a common rootstock to eliminate any own-root effects and to simulate conditions for a commercial walnut orchard setting, where rootstocks are commonly used. The grafted saplings were repotted and transferred to the Armstrong lathe house facility at the University of California, Davis in June 2019, and kept under natural light and temperature. Leaves from each accession and treatment were scanned using X-ray micro-computed tomography (microCT) on the X-ray μCT beamline (8.3.2) at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA USA) using the 10x objective lens with a pixel resolution of 650 nanometers. For masks, the background has a value of 170,170,170; Epidermis value= 85,85,85; Mesophyll value= 0,0,0; Bundle Sheath Extension value= 152,152,152; Vein value= 220,220,220; Air value = 255,255,255.Resource Software Recommended: Fiji (ImageJ),url: https://imagej.net/software/fiji/downloads

The Q-CAT (Querying-Supported Corpus Annotation Tool) is a computational tool for manual annotation of language corpora, which also enables advanced queries on top of these annotations. The tool has been used in various annotation campaigns related to the ssj500k reference training corpus of Slovenian (http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1210), such as named entities, dependency syntax, semantic roles and multi-word expressions, but it can also be used for adding new annotation layers of various types to this or other language corpora. Q-CAT is a .NET application, which runs on Windows operating system. Version 1.1 enables the automatic attribution of token IDs and personalized font adjustments. Version 1.2 supports the CONLL-U format and working with UD POS tags. Version 1.3 supports adding new layers of annotation on top of CONLL-U (and then saving the corpus as XML TEI).

As single-cell chromatin accessibility profiling methods advance, scATAC-seq has become ever more important in the study of candidate regulatory genomic regions and their roles underlying developmental, evolutionary, and disease processes. At the same time, cell type annotation is critical in understanding the cellular composition of complex tissues and identifying potential novel cell types. However, most existing methods that can perform automated cell type annotation are designed to transfer labels from an annotated scRNA-seq data set to another scRNA-seq data set, and it is not clear whether these methods are adaptable to annotate scATAC-seq data. Several methods have been recently proposed for label transfer from scRNA-seq data to scATAC-seq data, but there is a lack of benchmarking study on the performance of these methods. Here, we evaluated the performance of five scATAC-seq annotation methods on both their classification accuracy and scalability using publicly available single-cell datasets from mouse and human tissues including brain, lung, kidney, PBMC, and BMMC. Using the BMMC data as basis, we further investigated the performance of these methods across different data sizes, mislabeling rates, sequencing depths and the number of cell types unique to scATAC-seq. Bridge integration, which is the only method that requires additional multimodal data and does not need gene activity calculation, was overall the best method and robust to changes in data size, mislabeling rate and sequencing depth. Conos was the most time and memory efficient method but performed the worst in terms of prediction accuracy. scJoint tended to assign cells to similar cell types and performed relatively poorly for complex datasets with deep annotations but performed better for datasets only with major label annotations. The performance of scGCN and Seurat v3 was moderate, but scGCN was the most time-consuming method and had the most similar performance to random classifiers for cell types unique to scATAC-seq.

The Q-CAT (Querying-Supported Corpus Annotation Tool) is a tool for manual linguistic annotation of corpora, which also enables advanced queries on top of these annotations. The tool has been used in various annotation campaigns related to the ssj500k reference training corpus of Slovenian (http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1210), such as named entities, dependency syntax, semantic roles and multi-word expressions, but it can also be used for adding new annotation layers of various types to this or other language corpora. Q-CAT is a .NET application, which runs on Windows operating system.

Version 1.1 enables the automatic attribution of token IDs and personalized font adjustments. Version 1.2 supports the CONLL-U format and working with UD POS tags. Version 1.3 supports adding new layers of annotation on top of CONLL-U (and then saving the corpus as XML TEI). Version 1.4 introduces new features in command line mode (filtering by sentence ID, multiple link type visualizations)

Three-dimensional (3D) point cloud is the most direct and effective data form for studying plant structure and morphology. In point cloud studies, the point cloud segmentation of individual plants to organs directly determines the accuracy of organ-level phenotype estimation and the 3D plant reconstruction reliability. However, highly accurate, automatic, and robust point cloud segmentation approaches for plants are unavailable. Thus, the high-throughput segmentation of many shoots is challenging. Although deep learning can feasibly solve this issue, software tools for 3D point cloud annotation to construct the training dataset are lacking.In this paper, a top-to-down point cloud segmentation algorithm using optimal transportation distance for maize shoots is proposed. On this basis, a point cloud annotation toolkit, Label3DMaize, for maize shoot is developed. Further, the toolkit was applied to achieve semi-automatic point cloud segmentation and annotation of maize shoots at different growth stages, through a series of operations, including stem segmentation, coarse segmentation, fine segmentation, and sample-based segmentation. The toolkit takes about 4 to 10 minutes to segment a maize shoot, and consumes 10%-20% of the total time if only coarse segmentation is required. Fine segmentation is more detailed than coarse segmentation, especially at the organ connection regions. The accuracy of coarse segmentation can reach 97.2% of the fine segmentation.Label3DMaize integrates point cloud segmentation algorithms and manual interactive operations, realizing semi-automatic point cloud segmentation of maize shoots at different growth stages. The toolkit provides a practical data annotation tool for further online segmentation researches based on deep learning and is expected to promote automatic point cloud processing of various plants.

This is the accompanying data for the paper "Analyzing Dataset Annotation Quality Management in the Wild". Data quality is crucial for training accurate, unbiased, and trustworthy machine learning models and their correct evaluation. Recent works, however, have shown that even popular datasets used to train and evaluate state-of-the-art models contain a non-negligible amount of erroneous annotations, bias or annotation artifacts. There exist best practices and guidelines regarding annotation projects. But to the best of our knowledge, no large-scale analysis has been performed as of yet on how quality management is actually conducted when creating natural language datasets and whether these recommendations are followed. Therefore, we first survey and summarize recommended quality management practices for dataset creation as described in the literature and provide suggestions on how to apply them. Then, we compile a corpus of 591 scientific publications introducing text datasets and annotate it for quality-related aspects, such as annotator management, agreement, adjudication or data validation. Using these annotations, we then analyze how quality management is conducted in practice. We find that a majority of the annotated publications apply good or very good quality management. However, we deem the effort of 30% of the works as only subpar. Our analysis also shows common errors, especially with using inter-annotator agreement and computing annotation error rates.

The Q-CAT (Querying-Supported Corpus Annotation Tool) is a computational tool for manual annotation of language corpora, which also enables advanced queries on top of these annotations. The tool has been used in various annotation campaigns related to the ssj500k reference training corpus of Slovenian (http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1210), such as named entities, dependency syntax, semantic roles and multi-word expressions, but it can also be used for adding new annotation layers of various types to this or other language corpora. Q-CAT is a .NET application, which runs on Windows operating system.

Version 1.1 enables the automatic attribution of token IDs and personalized font adjustments.

The Q-CAT (Querying-Supported Corpus Annotation Tool) is a computational tool for manual annotation of language corpora, which also enables advanced queries on top of these annotations. The tool has been used in various annotation campaigns related to the ssj500k reference training corpus of Slovenian (http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1210), such as named entities, dependency syntax, semantic roles and multi-word expressions, but it can also be used for adding new annotation layers of various types to this or other language corpora. Q-CAT is a .NET application, which runs on Windows operating system. Version 1.1 enables the automatic attribution of token IDs and personalized font adjustments. Version 1.2 supports the CONLL-U format and working with UD POS tags.

AI-Powered Medical Imaging Annotation Market Outlook

According to our latest research, the AI-powered medical imaging annotation market size reached USD 1.85 billion globally in 2024. The market is experiencing robust expansion, driven by technological advancements and the rising adoption of artificial intelligence in healthcare. The market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 27.8% from 2025 to 2033, reaching a forecasted value of USD 15.69 billion by 2033. The primary growth factor fueling this trajectory is the increasing demand for accurate, scalable, and rapid annotation solutions to support AI-driven diagnostics and decision-making in clinical settings.

The growth of the AI-powered medical imaging annotation market is propelled by the exponential rise in medical imaging data generated by advanced diagnostic modalities. As healthcare providers continue to digitize patient records and imaging workflows, there is a pressing need for sophisticated annotation tools that can efficiently label vast volumes of images for training and validating AI algorithms. This trend is further amplified by the integration of machine learning and deep learning techniques, which require large, well-annotated datasets to achieve high accuracy in disease detection and classification. Consequently, hospitals, research institutes, and diagnostic centers are increasingly investing in AI-powered annotation platforms to streamline their operations and enhance clinical outcomes.

Another significant driver for the market is the growing prevalence of chronic diseases and the subsequent surge in diagnostic imaging procedures. Conditions such as cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and neurological disorders necessitate frequent imaging for early detection, monitoring, and treatment planning. The complexity and volume of these images make manual annotation labor-intensive and prone to variability. AI-powered annotation solutions address these challenges by automating the labeling process, ensuring consistency, and significantly reducing turnaround times. This not only improves the efficiency of radiologists and clinicians but also accelerates the deployment of AI-based diagnostic tools in routine clinical practice.

The evolution of regulatory frameworks and the increasing emphasis on data quality and patient safety are also shaping the growth of the AI-powered medical imaging annotation market. Regulatory agencies worldwide are encouraging the adoption of AI in healthcare, provided that the underlying data used for algorithm development is accurately annotated and validated. This has led to the emergence of specialized service providers offering compliant annotation solutions tailored to the stringent requirements of medical device approvals and clinical trials. As a result, the market is witnessing heightened collaboration between healthcare providers, technology vendors, and regulatory bodies to establish best practices and standards for medical image annotation.

Regionally, North America continues to dominate the AI-powered medical imaging annotation market, accounting for the largest share in 2024, followed closely by Europe and Asia Pacific. The United States, in particular, benefits from a mature healthcare IT infrastructure, strong research funding, and a high concentration of leading AI technology companies. Meanwhile, Asia Pacific is emerging as a high-growth region, fueled by rapid healthcare digitization, increasing investments in AI research, and expanding patient populations. Latin America and the Middle East & Africa are also witnessing steady growth, albeit at a slower pace, as healthcare systems modernize and adopt advanced imaging technologies.

Component Analysis

The component segment of the AI-powered medical imaging annotation market is bifurcated into software and services, both of which play pivotal roles in the overall ecosystem. Software solutions encompass annotation platforms, data management tools, and integration modules that enable seamless image labeling, workflow automation, and interoperability with existing hospital information systems. These platforms leverage advanced algorithms for image segmentation, object detection, and feature extraction, significantly enhancing the speed and accuracy of annotation tasks. The increasing sophistication of annotation software, including support for multi-modality images and customizable labeling protocols, is driving widespread adoption among health

Abstract Risk of bias (RoB) assessment of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) is vital to conducting systematic reviews. Manual RoB assessment for hundreds of RCTs is a cognitively demanding, lengthy process and is prone to subjective judgment. Supervised machine learning (ML) can help to accelerate this process but requires a hand-labelled corpus. There are currently no RoB annotation guidelines for randomized clinical trials or annotated corpora. In this pilot project, we test the practicality of directly using the revised Cochrane RoB 2.0 guidelines for developing an RoB annotated corpus using a novel multi-level annotation scheme. We report inter-annotator agreement among four annotators who used Cochrane RoB 2.0 guidelines. The agreement ranges between 0% for some bias classes and 76% for others. Finally, we discuss the shortcomings of this direct translation of annotation guidelines and scheme and suggest approaches to improve them to obtain an RoB annotated corpus suitable for ML. Methods The upload contains two zip files and a .json file. plain.html.zip Original corpus (n = 10) in .html format. The corpus was generated using the methodology described in the paper. Each .html file could be opened in any default text editor in any operating system or browser. A .html contains full text divided into several annotatable text parts. ann.json.zip The .zip contains RoB annotations conducted by the authors (R.H., M.S., K.G., R.C.). The annotation files are in .json format. Each .json is divided into two JSON objects and three JSON arrays. annotatable (object): Parts from the full-text document corresponding to the text parts from the plain .html files. metas (object): full-text document label entities (array): contains labelled entities. Each entity is linked to which part of the full-text it is linked to. relations (array) sources (array) annotations-legend.json This .json file contains entity and entity labels encoded to text legends. For example, entity class label "1_2_Yes_Good" is encoded as "e_113". Resources The code to parse annotations can be found on GitHub. Funding HES-SO Valais-Wallis, Sierre, Switzerland {"references": ["Dhrangadhariya A et al. First Steps towards a Risk of Bias Corpus of Randomized Controlled Trials. In Proceedings Medical Informatics Europe 2023. Gothenburg, Sweden."]}

The accuracy of each annotation method with respect to the expert annotations in each dataset. Aggregating maintains best or near-best accuracy across tasks.

DESCRIPTION
For this task, we use a subset of the MIRFLICKR (http://mirflickr.liacs.nl) collection. The entire collection contains 1 million images from the social photo sharing website Flickr and was formed by downloading up to a thousand photos per day that were deemed to be the most interesting according to Flickr. All photos in this collection were released by their users under a Creative Commons license, allowing them to be freely used for research purposes. Of the entire collection, 25 thousand images were manually annotated with a limited number of concepts and many of these annotations have been further refined and expanded over the lifetime of the ImageCLEF photo annotation task. This year we used crowd sourcing to annotate all of these 25 thousand images with the concepts.

On this page we provide you with more information about the textual features, visual features and concept features we supply with each image in the collection we use for this year's task.

TEXTUAL FEATURES
All images are accompanied by the following textual features:

- Flickr user tags
These are the tags that the users assigned to the photos their uploaded to Flickr. The 'raw' tags are the original tags, while the 'clean' tags are those collapsed to lowercase and condensed to removed spaces.

- EXIF metadata
If available, the EXIF metadata contains information about the camera that took the photo and the parameters used. The 'raw' exif is the original camera data, while the 'clean' exif reduces the verbosity.

- User information and Creative Commons license information
This contains information about the user that took the photo and the license associated with it.

VISUAL FEATURES
Over the previous years of the photo annotation task we noticed that often the same types of visual features are used by the participants, in particular features based on interest points and bag-of-words are popular. To assist you we have extracted several features for you that you may want to use, so you can focus on the concept detection instead. We additionally give you some pointers to easy to use toolkits that will help you extract other features or the same features but with different default settings.

- SIFT, C-SIFT, RGB-SIFT, OPPONENT-SIFT
We used the ISIS Color Descriptors (http://www.colordescriptors.com) toolkit to extract these descriptors. This package provides you with many different types of features based on interest points, mostly using SIFT. It furthermore assists you with building codebooks for bag-of-words. The toolkit is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

- SURF
We used the OpenSURF (http://www.chrisevansdev.com/computer-vision-opensurf.html) toolkit to extract this descriptor. The open source code is available in C++, C#, Java and many more languages.

- TOP-SURF
We used the TOP-SURF (http://press.liacs.nl/researchdownloads/topsurf) toolkit to extract this descriptor, which represents images with SURF-based bag-of-words. The website provides codebooks of several different sizes that were created using a combination of images from the MIR-FLICKR collection and from the internet. The toolkit also offers the ability to create custom codebooks from your own image collection. The code is open source, written in C++ and available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

- GIST
We used the LabelMe (http://labelme.csail.mit.edu) toolkit to extract this descriptor. The MATLAB-based library offers a comprehensive set of tools for annotating images.

For the interest point-based features above we used a Fast Hessian-based technique to detect the interest points in each image. This detector is built into the OpenSURF library. In comparison with the Hessian-Laplace technique built into the ColorDescriptors toolkit it detects fewer points, resulting in a considerably reduced memory footprint. We therefore also provide you with the interest point locations in each image that the Fast Hessian-based technique detected, so when you would like to recalculate some features you can use them as a starting point for the extraction. The ColorDescriptors toolkit for instance accepts these locations as a separate parameter. Please go to http://www.imageclef.org/2012/photo-flickr/descriptors for more information on the file format of the visual features and how you can extract them yourself if you want to change the default settings.

CONCEPT FEATURES
We have solicited the help of workers on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform to perform the concept annotation for us. To ensure a high standard of annotation we used the CrowdFlower platform that acts as a quality control layer by removing the judgments of workers that fail to annotate properly. We reused several concepts of last year's task and for most of these we annotated the remaining photos of the MIRFLICKR-25K collection that had not yet been used before in the previous task; for some concepts we reannotated all 25,000 images to boost their quality. For the new concepts we naturally had to annotate all of the images.

- Concepts
For each concept we indicate in which images it is present. The 'raw' concepts contain the judgments of all annotators for each image, where a '1' means an annotator indicated the concept was present whereas a '0' means the concept was not present, while the 'clean' concepts only contain the images for which the majority of annotators indicated the concept was present. Some images in the raw data for which we reused last year's annotations only have one judgment for a concept, whereas the other images have between three and five judgments; the single judgment does not mean only one annotator looked at it, as it is the result of a majority vote amongst last year's annotators.

- Annotations
For each image we indicate which concepts are present, so this is the reverse version of the data above. The 'raw' annotations contain the average agreement of the annotators on the presence of each concept, while the 'clean' annotations only include those for which there was a majority agreement amongst the annotators.

You will notice that the annotations are not perfect. Especially when the concepts are more subjective or abstract, the annotators tend to disagree more with each other. The raw versions of the concept annotations should help you get an understanding of the exact judgments given by the annotators.

This file contains the annotations for the ConfLab dataset, including actions (speaking status), pose, and F-formations.

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./actions/speaking_status:

./processed: the processed speaking status files, aggregated into a single data frame per segment. Skipped rows in the raw data (see https://josedvq.github.io/covfee/docs/output for details) have been imputed using the code at: https://github.com/TUDelft-SPC-Lab/conflab/tree/master/preprocessing/speaking_status

The processed annotations consist of:

./speaking: The first row contains person IDs matching the sensor IDs,

The rest of the row contains binary speaking status annotations at 60fps for the corresponding 2 min video segment (7200 frames).

./confidence: Same as above. These annotations reflect the continuous-valued rating of confidence of the annotators in their speaking annotation.

To load these files with pandas: pd.read_csv(p, index_col=False)

./raw.zip: the raw outputs from speaking status annotation for each of the eight annotated 2-min video segments. These were were output by the covfee annotation tool (https://github.com/josedvq/covfee)

Annotations were done at 60 fps.

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./pose:

./coco: the processed pose files in coco JSON format, aggregated into a single data frame per video segment. These files have been generated from the raw files using the code at: https://github.com/TUDelft-SPC-Lab/conflab-keypoints

To load in Python: f = json.load(open('/path/to/cam2_vid3_seg1_coco.json'))

The skeleton structure (limbs) is contained within each file in:

f['categories'][0]['skeleton']

and keypoint names at:

f['categories'][0]['keypoints']

./raw.zip: the raw outputs from continuous pose annotation. These were were output by the covfee annotation tool (https://github.com/josedvq/covfee)

Annotations were done at 60 fps.

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./f_formations:

seg 2: 14:00 onwards, for videos of the form x2xxx.MP4 in /video/raw/ for the relevant cameras (2,4,6,8,10).

seg 3: for videos of the form x3xxx.MP4 in /video/raw/ for the relevant cameras (2,4,6,8,10).

Note that camera 10 doesn't include meaningful subject information/body parts that are not already covered in camera 8.

First column: time stamp

Second column: "()" delineates groups, "<>" delineates subjects, cam X indicates the best camera view for which a particular group exists.

phone.csv: time stamp (pertaining to seg3), corresponding group, ID of person using the phone

Cloud-Based Surgical Video Annotation Service Market Outlook

According to our latest research, the global market size for Cloud-Based Surgical Video Annotation Service reached USD 346.7 million in 2024, with a robust compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.9% projected from 2025 to 2033. By the end of 2033, the market is forecasted to climb to USD 1,552.5 million. The key growth driver for this market is the escalating adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in surgical workflows, which is significantly enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of video-based analysis in healthcare settings.

The primary growth factor for the Cloud-Based Surgical Video Annotation Service Market is the increasing demand for advanced data-driven solutions in surgical procedures. Hospitals and surgical centers are leveraging cloud-based video annotation services to improve surgical outcomes, enhance training, and streamline workflow documentation. The ability to annotate, segment, and analyze surgical videos in real-time has become indispensable, especially as minimally invasive and robotic surgeries gain traction. These technologies enable clinicians to extract valuable insights from vast repositories of surgical footage, facilitating evidence-based decision-making and supporting continuous medical education. Additionally, the integration of AI-powered annotation tools is reducing manual effort and human error, leading to more precise surgical assessments and quality improvement initiatives.

Another significant driver is the growing emphasis on telemedicine and remote collaboration in the post-pandemic era. Cloud-based platforms allow for seamless sharing and annotation of surgical videos across geographically dispersed teams, fostering collaboration among surgeons, trainees, and researchers. This trend is particularly pronounced in academic and research institutions, where annotated surgical videos serve as invaluable resources for training, simulation, and peer review. The scalability and flexibility offered by cloud deployment models further enable healthcare organizations to manage large volumes of video data efficiently, without the need for significant on-premises infrastructure investments. As surgical techniques evolve and become more complex, the demand for comprehensive and accessible video annotation solutions is expected to rise correspondingly.

The proliferation of digital health ecosystems and the increasing regulatory focus on surgical quality and patient safety are also propelling market growth. Regulatory bodies and accreditation organizations are encouraging the adoption of video documentation and analytics to monitor surgical performance, identify adverse events, and ensure compliance with best practices. Cloud-based surgical video annotation services provide an auditable, secure, and scalable solution for storing and analyzing surgical videos, aligning with data privacy and security requirements. Furthermore, the integration of these services with hospital information systems (HIS) and electronic health records (EHR) is streamlining the documentation process and enhancing the continuity of care. As healthcare providers prioritize outcome-based reimbursement models, the role of annotated surgical videos in supporting quality metrics and clinical audits is becoming increasingly prominent.

From a regional perspective, North America currently leads the Cloud-Based Surgical Video Annotation Service Market, driven by the rapid adoption of digital health technologies, robust healthcare infrastructure, and a strong focus on surgical innovation. Europe follows closely, benefiting from supportive regulatory frameworks and significant investments in healthcare IT. The Asia Pacific region is emerging as a high-growth market, fueled by expanding healthcare access, rising surgical volumes, and increasing investments in cloud computing and AI. Latin America and the Middle East & Africa are also witnessing gradual adoption, primarily in urban centers and leading academic institutions. Regional disparities in digital infrastructure and data privacy regulations, however, continue to influence market penetration and growth trajectories.

The Q-CAT (Querying-Supported Corpus Annotation Tool) is a tool for manual linguistic annotation of corpora, which also enables advanced queries on top of these annotations. The tool has been used in various annotation campaigns related to the ssj500k reference training corpus of Slovenian (http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1210), such as named entities, dependency syntax, semantic roles and multi-word expressions, but it can also be used for adding new annotation layers of various types to this or other language corpora. Q-CAT is a .NET application, which runs on Windows operating system.

Version 1.1 enables the automatic attribution of token IDs and personalized font adjustments. Version 1.2 supports the CONLL-U format and working with UD POS tags. Version 1.3 supports adding new layers of annotation on top of CONLL-U (and then saving the corpus as XML TEI). Version 1.4 introduces new features in command line mode (filtering by sentence ID, multiple link type visualizations) Version 1.5 supports listening to audio recordings (provided in the # sound_url comment line in CONLL-U)

Negative log likelihood of each annotation method with respect to the expert annotations in each dataset. Individual soft-labeling methods vary between tasks, while aggregating maintains best or near-best NLL.