Annotating the Positions of Farm Animals

The client needed to annotate data in the agriculture industry. This included farm animals in various images and their positions needed to be annotated. These positions included things like laying down, standing or sitting and each one had its own corresponding color. In addition to this, they also needed key points to be placed along the animal’s face, head and tail so the system could better recognize them. Since it would be very time-consuming to perform such work in-house, the client approached Mindy Support with assistance with this project. 

Mindy Support assembled a team of 65 full-time data annotators to perform the needed annotation work. We labeled all of the farm animals with 2D boxes and polygons as well as the position they were in. This was very challenging since each photo contained 15-30 animals, and each one needed to be annotated with bounding boxes of different colors, each one corresponding to various positions. Also since the animals in some of the photos were closely grouped together, they were blocking each and it was difficult to tell where the beginning of the animal’s body was. Our annotators needed to make an educated guess to correctly fulfill the project requirements.