Objects and annotations¶
An object is one annotated thing in one image: a closed contour, a label, and the provenance of how it came to exist.
Contours¶
An object's geometry is a closed contour — a polygon in image coordinates. It can come from:
- a model prediction, from a point/box/polygon/freehand prompt
- a manual drawing, with the polygon or freehand tools
- a model prediction that a human then edited
That last case is the common one, and it is why provenance is tracked rather than inferred. Model output and human edits stay separable, which matters both for trusting a measurement and for deciding what to fine-tune on.
Parents and children¶
Objects can name another object in the same image as their parent. This is what
lets you count polyps within a colony, or measure the area of a structure and the
structures inside it, and it is what the n_children metric reads.
Parent–child links between objects are a different thing from parent–child links between labels. The label hierarchy declares which kinds of thing may contain which; object parentage records which particular things actually do. The two are tied together by one rule: an object's label must be a direct child of the label on its parent object.
Overlapping objects¶
Multiple objects may overlap on the same image. Dense, overlapping structure was one of the driving cases for the tool — reef survey imagery where colonies touch and occlude one another — so overlap is a supported state rather than a conflict to resolve.
Editing¶
Any contour can be edited after the fact: select it (V), press E, and adjust its points directly — you do not have to redraw an outline to fix part of it.
Brush / mask painting
The rail has a Brush / mask slot (M), but it is not available in this build — it renders disabled rather than silently missing. Refine contours by editing their points instead.
contour-editSelect a predicted contour, enter edit mode, adjust its points at high zoom.
10–12 s · zoomed in on fine detail · dark theme · 1280×800