Semi-Automatic Annotation of Objects in Visual-Thermal Video

Deep learning requires large amounts of annotated data. Manual annotation of objects in video is, regardless of annotation type, a tedious and time-consuming process. In particular, for scarcely used image modalities human annotation is hard to justify. In such cases, semi-automatic annotation provides an acceptable option. In this work, a recursive, semi-automatic annotation method for video is presented. The proposed method utilizes a state-of-the-art video object segmentation method to propose initial annotations for all frames in a video based on only a few manual object segmentations. In the case of a multi-modal dataset, the multi-modality is exploited to refine the proposed annotations even further. The final tentative annotations are presented to the user for manual correction. The method is evaluated on a subset of the RGBT-234 visual-thermal dataset reducing the workload for a human annotator with approximately 78% compared to full manual annotation. Utilizing the proposed pipeline, sequences are annotated for the VOT-RGBT 2019 challenge.