[GSoC'24] Adding new formats to CVAT

[Harsh Kumar]

Hello CVAT Community

I am excited to announce that I am contributing to CVAT as part of the Google Summer of Code 2024. My primary task is to add new formats to the platform and provide enhancements and bug fixes for the existing ones.

After taking into account the community poll on Discord and talking to my mentors, I have finalized my HLD. You can check out the final HLD and plan. Feel free to check out my initial GSoC proposal, too. 

I would like to start a thread with this email and plan to keep the community updated bi-weekly about the progress. 

During the first weeks of the coding period, we finalized the HLD and proposal. Currently, the project is focused on Datumaro. I am finishing the implementation of support for YOLOv8, including bounding boxes, oriented bounding boxes, keypoints, and segmentation masks. The import and export functionality should be fully incorporated into Datumaro by next week. You can find the pull request for this feature here: #44

The next step is to integrate this implementation into CVAT, which I expect to be completed in the coming weeks.

I am grateful for this opportunity and would like to thank Nikita (CVAT admin and my mentor), the CVAT team, and everyone in the community. First-hand user experience and feedback are crucial for this task, so I look forward to working with all the community members and contributors and learning from you. I appreciate any opinions, feedback, and suggestions you might have. I am best reached via email

Best regards,  
Harsh 

[Harsh Kumar]

Hello folks

During the last week, I finalized the implementation of Yolo tasks. We decided to separate the tasks into their own format, so instead of having a single Yolo class and sub-tasks, each task is now a format in itself. This design choice was made to achieve better usability and less confusion. You can now find 4 new formats in datumaro:

• YoloDetection (yolo_detection)
• YoloPose (yolo_pose)
• YoloSegmentation (yolo_segmentation)
• YoloOrientedBoundingBox (yolo_orientedbox)

I have updated the user manual to help the community use and provide feedback. As soon as the PR gets accepted to the main develop branch, it will be generally available. For now, you can follow this #44. Due to some personal issues, I haven't been able to resolve comments on the PR, which is the main hindrance to the acceptance of PR. I will make sure that the PR gets merged this week.

I am excited for the community to use this tool and help me with suggestions and feedback. Before the end of this month, we hope to integrate this in the main CVAT repo so you can use Yolo formats directly through CVAT.

Stay tuned

Best regards

Harsh

[Harsh Kumar]

Hi folks

The progress for the last two weeks has been very minimal due to a health issue I am having. I was in the middle of writing tests for the new Yolo formats mentioned in the last email before I had to take a break. The user manual stays up for those of you who want to try the new formats, but it may be prone to errors. I hope to resume work this week and will try to complete the merge with Datumaro so that integration in the CVAT repo can begin.

I apologize for the delay in this project again

Stay tuned

Harsh