TagLab was created to support the activity of annotation and extraction of statistical data from ortho-maps of benthic communities. The tool includes different types of CNN-based segmentation networks specially trained for agnostic (relative only to contours) or semantic (also related to species) recognition of corals. TagLab is an ongoing project of the Visual Computing Lab http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/.

TagLab allows to :

• zoom and navigate a large map using a Map viewer -zoom/ mouse wheel - pan/ 'move' tool selected + left button -with every other tool selected the pan is activated with ctrl + left button
• segment coral instances using the Deep Extreme Cut network fine-tuned on coral images.

Deep Extreme Cut original code : https://github.com/scaelles/DEXTR-PyTorch/

• assign a class with the 'Assign class' tool. Area and perimeter are now displayed in pixels (the scale can be added to transform measures in mm) in the segmentation info panel on the right.
• simultaneously turn off the visibility of one or more classes, (ctrl + left button/disable all but the selected, shift + left button, inverse operation), change the class transparency using the above slider.
• edit the incorrect edges with the 'Edit Border' tool.
• Draw coral internal cracks with the 'Create Crack' tool.
• Perform the boolean operation between labels: 'Merge Overlapped Labels', 'Divide Label', 'Subtract Label' (right button panel)
• make freehand measurements or measure the distance between centroids (Ruler tool).
• save the annotations (as polygons) and import them into a new project (Save Annotation, Load Annotation)
• Export a .csv file table containing the data of each coral colony.
• Export a .jpg file of a black background with totally opaque labels.

Taglab relies on CUDA 10 and Python 3.6 and needs a few packages to be installed. Probably the simplest way to prepare a clean pc to run TagLab is to install the standard python distribution (3.6 version) and then run the pip installer for adding all following packages:

Just click on the "Clone or Download" button at the top of this page and unzip the whole package in a folder of your choice.

TagLab uses a retrained dextr network for the four-click segmentation; the file with the weights is not included in the git repository for its size and have to be downloaded from this link; the downloaded dextr_corals.pth file must be placed in the models folder of the repository downloaded at the previous steps

Open a python prompt and just start TagLab.py, the tool will start and you can try to open the sample that you can find in the projects folder.

• Optimization of the EditBorder tool (currently slow on large instances).
• Project initialization Interface (Map, scale, Folder, Global Coordinates).
• Management of different layers (comparison different years surveys).
• Weights of a more accurate Deep Extreme Segmentation network.
• Possibility to manage the registration of colonies with dead portions.
• Addition of a Semantic Segmentation Network.