Containers

Annotation containers provide functions for loading and saving labels. You can write custom containers to support specific label formats.

Container Interface

A container is expected to implement (at least) these five functions:

load(self, filename)

Loads and returns the annotations in file filename.

save(self, annotations, filename)

Writes the given annotations to file filename.

filename(self)

Returns the current filename.

loadImage(self, filename)

Loads and returns the image referenced to by filename

loadFrame(self, filename, frame_number)

Load the video referenced to by the filename, and return frame frame_number.

The container base class AnnotationContainer provides default implementations for all five function. It however defers the parsing and serialization of the labels from/to disk to the two functions

parseFromFile(self, filename)

and

serializeToFile(self, filename, annotations)

respectively. If you subclass AnnotationContainer, make sure to provide implementations for those two functions.

Default Containers

A few containers are included in Sloth. They can be found in the module sloth.annotations.container. In the default configuration, these containers are included for their respective default filename pattern.

JsonContainer

Default pattern: *.json

Writes and reads annotations in JSON format (needs the python module json to be installed).

YamlContainer

Default pattern: *.yaml

Writes and reads annotations in YAML format (needs the python module yaml to be installed).

MsgpackContainer

Default pattern: *.msgpack

Writes and reads annotations in Msgpack format (needs the python module msgpack to be installed).

PickleContainer

Default pattern: *.pickle

Writes and reads annotations in pickle format (needs the python module pickle or cPickle to be installed, cPickle is more performant).

FileNameListContainer

Default pattern: *.sloth-init

A simple container that reads one image filename per line. No annotations are supported. This container can be used for example for initializing a labeling session. After adding labels, another container should be used for saving though, otherwise the labels will be lost (write support is not implemented).

FeretContainer

Reads annotations in the Feret format (no write support implemented yet). This container is not included in the default configuration.