Efficient Multi-purpose Video Annotation for Fast Labeling

We propose an efficient method to label the frames of a video consistently and quickly. Our method is motivated by welding videos, where molten metal moves continuously, and some frames may be noisy due to the high intensity of arc and spatters that can obscure the desired point to be annotated. The traditional annotation methods which pause the videos and annotate each frame individually are time-consuming and may result in inconsistent labeling between different annotators for noisy frames of a video. Our new proposed method benefits from the fact that video sequences are contiguous. We track the location of the cursor while the video is being played, with the user controlling the playback speed, including the playback direction. We process the recorded cursor locations to convert them to the final annotation. Compared to frame-to-frame annotation methods, we show that our proposed interface speeds up the annotating process by 21 times while maintaining consistency of the labels.