COCO Annotator vs MakeSense.ai

COCO Annotator is a web-based tool for creating image annotations used in training data for localization and object detection. It supports bounding boxes, polygons, segmentation masks, keypoints, and points, along with disconnected shapes treated as one instance, multiple labels on an image segment, and custom metadata. Users can import existing COCO datasets and export annotations in COCO format. Assisted options include DEXTR, MaskRCNN, Magic Wand, semi-trained model annotation, and Google Images dataset generation. The software includes user authentication and a REST API, with a Swagger interface at localhost:5000/api. It is self-hosted on Linux or Windows, and Docker with docker-compose is required because Docker is the only supported installation method. Documentation covers development and production builds, centralized datasets, and external access. The server uses Flask, Eventlet, and Gunicorn, while long-running requests go to RabbitMQ workers. The project recommends HTTPS to encrypt browser-to-site communication and invites users to its Discord community. It is listed as free under an MIT-licensed plan.

MakeSense.ai is a browser-based tool for labeling photos and preparing datasets for computer vision projects. It supports point, line, rectangle, polygon, and label annotations, with model-assisted labeling through YOLOv5, SSD pretrained on COCO, and PoseNet. Users can load their own YOLOv5 models exported to TensorFlow.js format. Export options include CSV, YOLO, VOC XML, VGG JSON, and COCO JSON; imports include YOLO, VOC XML, and COCO JSON. The available format combinations vary by annotation type, and some are not yet supported. The project says images are not sent to a server and AI features run using TensorFlow.js. It works in a browser across operating systems, and documented local and Docker setups are available; Docker serves the application on localhost:3000. The project describes it as suitable for small computer vision deep-learning projects and dataset preparation. It was founded in 2019, is licensed under GPL-3.0, and credits Piotr Skalski as author and copyright holder. The Free plan costs nothing.