Data format

COCO has several annotation types: for object detection, keypoint detection, stuff segmentation, panoptic segmentation, densepose, and image captioning. The annotations are stored using JSON. Please note that the COCO API described on the download page can be used to access and manipulate all anotations. All annotations share the same basic data structure below:

The data structures specific to the various annotation types are described below.

1. Object Detection

Each object instance annotation contains a series of fields, including the category id and segmentation mask of the object. The segmentation format depends on whether the instance represents a single object (iscrowd=0 in which case polygons are used) or a collection of objects (iscrowd=1 in which case RLE is used). Note that a single object (iscrowd=0) may require multiple polygons, for example if occluded. Crowd annotations (iscrowd=1) are used to label large groups of objects (e.g. a crowd of people). In addition, an enclosing bounding box is provided for each object (box coordinates are measured from the top left image corner and are 0-indexed). Finally, the categories field of the annotation structure stores the mapping of category id to category and supercategory names. See also the detection task.

2. Keypoint Detection

A keypoint annotation contains all the data of the object annotation (including id, bbox, etc.) and two additional fields. First, "keypoints" is a length 3k array where k is the total number of keypoints defined for the category. Each keypoint has a 0-indexed location x,y and a visibility flag v defined as v=0: not labeled (in which case x=y=0), v=1: labeled but not visible, and v=2: labeled and visible. A keypoint is considered visible if it falls inside the object segment. "num_keypoints" indicates the number of labeled keypoints (v>0) for a given object (many objects, e.g. crowds and small objects, will have num_keypoints=0). Finally, for each category, the categories struct has two additional fields: "keypoints," which is a length k array of keypoint names, and "skeleton", which defines connectivity via a list of keypoint edge pairs and is used for visualization. Currently keypoints are only labeled for the person category (for most medium/large non-crowd person instances). See also the keypoint task.

3. Stuff Segmentation

The stuff annotation format is identical and fully compatible to the object detection format above (except iscrowd is unnecessary and set to 0 by default). We provide annotations in both JSON and png format for easier access, as well as conversion scripts between the two formats. In the JSON format, each category present in an image is encoded with a single RLE annotation (see the Mask API for more details). The category_id represents the id of the current stuff category. For more details on stuff categories and supercategories see the stuff evaluation page. See also the stuff task.

4. Panoptic Segmentation

For the panoptic task, each annotation struct is a per-image annotation rather than a per-object annotation. Each per-image annotation has two parts: (1) a PNG that stores the class-agnostic image segmentation and (2) a JSON struct that stores the semantic information for each image segment. In more detail:

1. To match an annotation with an image, use the image_id field (that is annotation.image_id==image.id).
2. For each annotation, per-pixel segment ids are stored as a single PNG at annotation.file_name. The PNGs are in a folder with the same name as the JSON, i.e., annotations/name/ for annotations/name.json. Each segment (whether it's a stuff or thing segment) is assigned a unique id. Unlabeled pixels (void) are assigned a value of 0. Note that when you load the PNG as an RGB image, you will need to compute the ids via ids=R+G*256+B*256^2.
3. For each annotation, per-segment info is stored in annotation.segments_info. segment_info.id stores the unique id of the segment and is used to retrieve the corresponding mask from the PNG (ids==segment_info.id). category_id gives the semantic category and iscrowd indicates the segment encompasses a group of objects (relevant for thing categories only). The bbox and area fields provide additional info about the segment.
4. The COCO panoptic task has the same thing categories as the detection task, whereas the stuff categories differ from those in the stuff task (for details see the panoptic evaluation page). Finally, each category struct has two additional fields: isthing that distinguishes stuff and thing categories and color that is useful for consistent visualization.

5. Image Captioning

These annotations are used to store image captions. Each caption describes the specified image and each image has at least 5 captions (some images have more). See also the captioning task.

6. DensePose

For the DensePose task, each annotation contains a series of fields, including category id, bounding box, body part masks and parametrization data for selected points, which are detailed below.

Crowd annotations (iscrowd=1) are used to label large groups of objects (e.g. a crowd of people).

An enclosing bounding box is provided for each person (box coordinates are measured from the top left image corner and are 0-indexed).

The categories field of the annotation structure stores the mapping of category id to category and supercategory names.

DensePose annotations are stored in dp_* fields:

Annotated masks:

• dp_masks: RLE encoded dense masks. All part masks are of size 256x256. They correspond to 14 semantically meaningful parts of the body: Torso, Right Hand, Left Hand, Left Foot, Right Foot, Upper Leg Right, Upper Leg Left, Lower Leg Right, Lower Leg Left, Upper Arm Left, Upper Arm Right, Lower Arm Left, Lower Arm Right, Head;

Annotated points:

• dp_x, dp_y: spatial coordinates of collected points on the image. The coordinates are scaled such that the bounding box size is 256x256;
• dp_I: The patch index that indicates which of the 24 surface patches the point is on. Patches correspond to the body parts described above. Some body parts are split into 2 patches: 1, 2 = Torso, 3 = Right Hand, 4 = Left Hand, 5 = Left Foot, 6 = Right Foot, 7, 9 = Upper Leg Right, 8, 10 = Upper Leg Left, 11, 13 = Lower Leg Right, 12, 14 = Lower Leg Left, 15, 17 = Upper Arm Left, 16, 18 = Upper Arm Right, 19, 21 = Lower Arm Left, 20, 22 = Lower Arm Right, 23, 24 = Head;
• dp_U, dp_V: Coordinates in the UV space. Each surface patch has a separate 2D parameterization.