The Best Data Curation Tools for Computer Vision in 2021
Tags: machinelearning, datascience, computerscience, database
Published: 2021-05-03 01:12:31

The term ‘curation’ is commonly associated with museums or libraries, not data science. However, much like the work that’s done on rare paintings or books, data curation tools make the most important data easily accessible to engineers as they build complex machine learning models.

Without curation, data is difficult to find, analyze, and interpret. Data curation tools provide meaningful insights and enduring access to all your data in one place. In this article, we’ll dive into the importance of data curation for computer vision specifically, as well as review the top data curation tools on the market today.

## What is data curation?
Data curation is the act of organizing, enhancing, and preserving data for future use. In machine learning, data curation describes the management of data throughout its lifecycle: from its collection and initially storage, to the time it is archived for future re-use.

This process is all the more important for computer vision engineers, who deal with massive amounts of visual data on a daily basis. Instead of using manual methods such as writing ETL jobs to extract insights, data curation tools provide a streamlined way to access the right data whenever you need to.

## The importance of data curation for machine learning
Under the hood, data curation tools directly influence computer vision model performance. Using data curation tools, engineers can get a better understanding of the data they’ve collected, identify the most important subsets and edge cases, and curate custom training datasets to feed back into their models.

The best data curation tools enable you to:

- __Visualize large scale data__: Make it easy to obtain insights on key metrics, as well as the general distribution and diversity of your datasets regardless of sensor type and format. 

- __Enable data discovery and retrieval__: Quickly search, filter, and sort through the entire data lake by making all features queryable and easily accessible. 

- __Curate diverse scenarios__: Identify the most interesting segments within your dataset, and manipulate them within the tool to create completely customized training sets.

- __Seamlessly integrate__: The tool should fit well within your existing workflows and toolset.

## What are the best data curation tools for computer vision?
With an overwhelming amount of AI products and platforms popping up year after year, how do you know which will provide the most value? Based on our experience, we are sharing our honest reviews of the top tools, hoping that this will be of use for engineers searching for a data curation solution.

Read on below to find out which data curation tool is the best fit for your computer vision project.

### Aquarium Learning
Aquarium is a data management platform that aims to make it easy to identify labeling errors and model failures. With Aquarium, users can version and combine model predictions with their ground truth. 

Aquarium is especially focused on curating and maintaining training datasets, catering less to raw data management use cases. This is because data exploration in Aquarium is predominantly tied to model predictions and ground truth labels. 

Users can access Aquarium via their cloud platform or API. However, they currently do not offer on-premise or VPC deployments, and there are no external integrations.

- __Wide range of use cases__ - Aquarium supports image, 3D, audio, and text data. They also support multiple annotation types, such as classification, detection, and segmentation.

- __Interactive model evaluation__ - Users can manipulate evaluation thresholds and obtain interactive visualizations to obtain required samples quickly.

- __Collaborative features__ - Users can collaborate with each other on the Aquarium platform to build data subsets, associate them with issues, and identify new data for annotation.

### Scale Nucleus
Launched in late 2020 by Scale, Nucleus is one of the newest data curation tools to hit the market. The Nucleus platform allows users to collaboratively search through image data for model failures. As of now, Nucleus only supports image data, with no support for 3D sensor fusion, video, or text data.

Users can access Nucleus via their cloud platform, API or Python SDK. Currently, Nucleus does not support on-premise deployability.

- __Visual similarity__ - Users can search for visually similar images based on one or multiple base samples and associate custom tags with them.

- __Metadata schemas__ - Using the Nucleus SDK, users can create flexible metadata schemas. Nucleus provides smart methods to detect and create schemas using the annotation format provided. 

- __Model versioning__ - Users can create model entities and associate corresponding runs with them. Hence, models can be versioned based on runs (dataset & predictions).

### SiaSearch
[SiaSearch](https://www.siasearch.io/) is a data management platform for computer vision data. Consisting of a scalable metadata catalog and query engine, SiaSearch enables developers to easily search through visual data, add metadata to frames and sequences, as well as assemble custom subsets of data for training or testing. 

With deep roots in autonomous driving, the SiaSearch platform is used by many OEMs, Tier 1s and tech companies. Aside from autonomous driving, SiaSearch also has solutions for robotics, retail, [and more](https://www.siasearch.io/usecases). 

- __Specialized in sensor data__ - One of the only tools that can support 3D sensor fusion data, SiaSearch can analyze large volumes of unstructured sensor data, providing insights at the frame and sequence level. 

- __Auto-tagging capabilities__ - SiaSearch employs a large catalog of pre-trained extractors to automatically add frame-level, contextual metadata to raw data. Additionally, SiaSearch provides a toolbox for quick extractor development, allowing developers to integrate their own extractors.

- __Fast performance__ - The SiaSearch platform features a unique, proprietary architecture that combines numeric and sequence-based queries to enable noticeably faster performance. 

- __Flexible workflows & integrations__ - Users can access SiaSearch via their web-based GUI or programmatic API. SiaSearch also supports cloud or on-premise deployment for enterprise users.

## Interested in data curation?
The right data curation tool can dramatically reduce the time spent on manual processes, allowing engineers to focus on what really matters - building great models.

If you’d like to hear more about what we’re doing at SiaSearch, reach out to us at hi@siasearch.io, or visit [the SiaSearch website](https://www.siasearch.io/) to learn more.

_Read the full list on our blog: https://www.siasearch.io/blog/best-data-curation-tools-for-computer-vision_