3D Labeling Tool

Abstract: Training and testing supervised object detection models require a large collection of images with ground truth labels. Labels define object classes in the image, as well as their locations, shape, and possibly other information such as pose. The labeling process has proven extremely time consuming, even with the presence of manpower. We introduce a novel labeling tool for 2D images as well as 3D triangular meshes: 3D Labeling Tool (3DLT). This is a standalone, feature-heavy and cross-platform software that does not require installation and can run on Windows, macOS and Linux-based distributions. Instead of labeling the same object on every image separately like current tools, we use depth information to reconstruct a triangular mesh from said images and label the object only once on the aforementioned mesh. We use registration to simplify 3D labeling, outlier detection to improve 2D bounding box calculation and surface reconstruction to expand labeling possibility to large point clouds. Our tool is tested against state of the art methods and it greatly surpasses them in terms of speed while preserving accuracy and ease of use.