Image flickering, zoom point selection issue, and clarification on Tile Annotations

[SiaLemons]

Hi EZannot,

First of all, thank you for the new update. While using the program after the update, we’ve encountered a few issues.

1. Image flickering:
   When performing any actions in manual annotation (e.g., adding annotations, editing, or zooming), we experience flickering in the image frame where it momentarily turns black, including the annotation. We also noticed this issue before the update, but now the black screen lasts much longer, around a second, making it difficult to see whether the annotation was applied correctly. We tried adjusting the screen refresh rate, but it doesn’t seem to help with the flickering.

2. Zoom and point selection:
   The new zoom function is a great addition and will make our work much easier. However, the polygon points have become harder to select, we often end up moving the wrong points. It seems that the clickable area around each point might not scale correctly when zooming.

3. Tile Annotations feature:
   We’re also unsure what the new Tile Annotations function does and how it can help when working with larger frame sizes. Could you please clarify its purpose or provide a brief explanation of how to use it effectively?

Thanks again for your work and for continuously improving the tool.

[yujiahu415]

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback!

1. Yes, this is indeed a problem. But since it's not a functionality issue and this issue can be largely mitigated by using a better GPU, CPU, or higher memory (a good GPU is typically needed for using EZannot on large images), I won't work on this until I finish my other priorities. Another thing you can do to reduce the flickering when zooming in is turn off the AI help during the zooming in.

2. I'll look into this and address this issue in the next release. For now, you probably need to rely on the AI-assisted, automatic detection of the object outlines. By the way, what kind of images and what kind of objects you wanted to annotate? Is the background very noisy? Typically, the AI-assisted, automatic detection of the object outlines works well without the need of manually modifying the polygons.

3. This function is useful if: a) your single images are too large to be fit into your GPU memory. b) if you want to train an Annotator to perform the automatic annotation for these large images. What's the height and width of your images? And what's the memory of your GPU (VRAM)? You can use the tiling function to divide a large, annotated image into smaller, annotated tiles, and then perform augmentation on those tiles, and then use the augmented tiles to train an Annotator. After that, you can use the trained Annotator to automatically annotate your large images.

[yujiahu415]

Hi,

I have fixed the #2 issue and also did some quick improvement on the flickering problem when you modify the polygons. I have been still working on other new features for the next release. So, in case you don't want to wait until the next release, I have attached the modified script file here. You can download it, navigate to where EZannot is installed on your computer, go into the EZannot/ folder, replace the file that has the same name with this modified one. And restart your terminal.

Let me know if you have questions or issues.

gui_annotating.py