The VIA Annotation Software for Images, Audio and Video

In this paper, we introduce a simple and standalone manual annotation tool for images, audio and video: the VGG Image Annotator (VIA). This is a light weight, standalone and offline software package that does not require any installation or setup and runs solely in a web browser. Due to its lightness and flexibility, the VIA software has quickly become an essential and invaluable research support tool in many academic disciplines. Furthermore, it has also been very popular in several industrial sectors which have invested in adapting this open source software to their requirements. Since its public release in 2017, the VIA software has been used more than 600,000 times and has nurtured a large and thriving open source community.