Need annotated image data to train your model? As you may know, sourcing the raw data is only half the battle. However, like many development teams, you may not have the time nor the workforce to annotate the data in-house. In such cases, outsourcing image annotation services is often the most efficient option. To help you find the perfect annotation solution, this list will introduce five of the best image annotation companies for big data outsourcing. 

While some of the companies below offer a variety of services, all of them provide image annotation services for machine learning projects. 

What are the Best Image Annotation Companies

for Big Data Outsourcing?

1. Lionbridge AI

With over 20 years of experience, Lionbridge is one of the largest language services providers in the world. They are an industry leader in entity annotation, sentiment classification, multilingual transcription, and more.

By acquiring Gengo AI in 2019, the company branched into all areas of data collection and annotation for machine learning, with added investment in state-of-the-art image annotation tools. They have since landed major projects with some of the world’s largest tech companies.

Lionbridge’s image annotation services include:

2D Bounding Boxes

Cuboids (3D Bounding Boxes)

Polygons

Landmark Annotation (Keypoint Annotation)

Lines 

Circles

Image Classification

Semantic Segmentation

Image Transcription

With a community of over 1 million contributors worldwide, Lionbridge is a go-to company for big data outsourcing. Furthermore, the company is set to release an all-in-one data annotation platform in mid 2020. The tool will be capable of supporting various types of image, video, audio, and text annotation. With this platform, project managers can invite their own annotators, create projects with multiple annotation types, and track worker statistics. 

2. Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is an online platform where you can outsource jobs, surveys, and more to individuals all over the world. However, the tasks must be those which can be done remotely and often with little or no training. These short and relatively simple tasks are known as microtasks and make up the bulk of jobs available on the MTurk marketplace. 

On MTurk you are free to choose how much you pay crowdworkers per task. However, you must also handle all the project management, quality assurance, data preprocessing and post processing on your own. For small image annotation projects, MTurk could be a good and simple option. However, when it comes to big data outsourcing, you should create a strong QA system for the MTurk workflow before fully committing to MTurk as your sole data annotation platform. 

3. LabelBox

Based out of San Francisco, LabelBox is another well-known company in the AI industry for big data outsourcing. Their service offerings focus on text classification, object annotation, image segmentation, image classification, and other services for computer vision. Like Lionbridge, they are an image annotation company that offers both a platform for research teams to use in-house, and a crowdsourced data labeling service. 

4. Hive

Hive has been around since 2013 and offers a wide variety of AI services, including image annotation and other data labeling. While they are an image annotation company, they also state that they are the world’s first full-stack AI company, with solutions not limited to data annotation. The company also works in model development and app development, specializing in object detection, transcription, and facial recognition.

5. Taqadam 

A smaller and newer company in the industry, Taqadam is a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation focused on sustainable development. The company uses its AI training data services to provide remote work opportunities for people in lower income countries or post-conflict areas such as Lebanon and Iraq. 

At the moment, the company mainly offers image annotation and geospatial analytics services. One of the most unique value propositions of TaQadam is their image annotation tool, which runs on mobile devices. 

Above were just five of the best image annotation companies for big data outsourcing. With more and more computer vision companies entering the market, the demand for image annotation services will continue to grow.