Geometric bounding box interpolation: an alternative for efficient video annotation

In video annotation, instead of annotating every frame of a trajectory, usually only a sparse set of annotations is provided by the user: typically its endpoints plus some key intermediate frames, interpolating the remaining annotations between these key frames in order to reduce the cost of the video labeling. While a number of video annotation tools have been proposed, some of which are freely available, and bounding box interpolation is mainly based on image processing techniques whose performance is highly dependent on image quality, occlusions, etc. We propose an alternative method to interpolate bounding box annotations, based on cubic splines and the geometric properties of the elements involved, rather than image processing techniques. The algorithm proposed is compared with other bounding box interpolation methods described in the literature, using a set of selected videos modeling different types of object and camera motion. Experiments show that the accuracy of the interpolated bounding boxes is higher than the accuracy of the other evaluated methods, especially when considering rigid objects. The main goal of this paper is related with the bounding box interpolation step, and we believe that our design can be integrated seamlessly with any annotation tool already developed.