Visual data plays an integral part in our society and technology today. A massive amount of images are processed daily, from using facial recognition to unlock your mobile phone to detecting lane departure while driving. Any technology processing image data is likely implementing image annotation. Image annotation is similar to data labeling but in the context of visual data such as video or images.

Image annotation is the practice of labeling images to train AI and machine learning models. It often involves human annotators using an image annotation tool to label images or tag relevant information, for example, by assigning relevant classes to different entities in an image. The resulting data also referred toas structured data, is then fed to a machine learning algorithm, which is often understood as training a model.

For example, you can ask your annotators to annotate vehicles in a given set of images. The resulting data can help you train a model that can recognize and detect vehicles and discriminate them from pedestrians, traffic lights, or potential obstacles on the road to navigate safely.