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Guides for visual AI teams.

Practical guides on annotation best practices, dataset formats, model training, and deployment — written for people building real systems.

Essentials

Computer vision, in plain language.

The concepts behind every dataset-to-model workflow — no jargon.

Image annotation

Labeling images so a model can learn from them — drawing bounding boxes, outlining shapes (segmentation), or assigning a class. Annotation quality sets the ceiling on model quality.

Detection vs segmentation

Object detection puts a box around each object and names it. Segmentation outlines the exact shape (a mask). Use detection for “where and what”; use segmentation when precise boundaries matter, like a crack or a leaf.

Classification

Assigning one label — or several, for multi-label — to a whole image rather than locating objects within it. Useful for pass/fail and category tasks.

Dataset quality

Balanced classes, clean labels, representative samples, and correct train/validation/test splits. Leakage between splits silently inflates accuracy; Anastig runs health checks to catch it.

Human-in-the-loop

AI proposes labels; a person reviews, edits, or rejects them. You keep the speed of automation without letting silent mistakes into the dataset — the model is only as good as the labels you approve.

Privacy-preserving workflows

Doing as much as possible where the data already lives. In Anastig, annotation and export run in your browser, and heavy models run on a GPU worker your organization controls, so sensitive images can stay in your boundary.

Formats

Which export format when.

Anastig Studio exports each of these, validated before download. See the full format reference or the Export Center.

FormatFilesBest for
YOLO / YOLO-seg.txt + dataset.yamlFast detection and segmentation training across the YOLO family and many modern trainers.
COCO JSON.jsonDetection and segmentation with rich metadata; widely supported by research tooling.
Pascal VOC.xmlClassic detection format — one human-readable XML per image.
Classification CSV.csvSimple image-to-label tables for classification tasks.
Guides

In-depth guides.

Long-form tutorials are being written. Start with the essentials above or the interactive demo.

Annotation8 min

How to Label Images for AI

A complete guide to image annotation for computer vision models.

Guide coming soon
Annotation6 min

Object Detection Annotation Guide

Annotating bounding boxes for YOLO and COCO object detection models.

Guide coming soon
Dataset5 min

Building a Classification Dataset

How to create and structure image classification datasets for training.

Guide coming soon
Annotation7 min

Segmentation Annotation Guide

Instance and semantic segmentation labeling techniques.

Guide coming soon
Formats6 min

YOLO Dataset Format Explained

Understanding YOLO label files, dataset.yaml, and directory structure.

Guide coming soon
Formats5 min

COCO JSON Format Guide

COCO format annotations, instances, categories, and metadata.

Guide coming soon
Dataset4 min

Dataset Splitting Best Practices

Train/val/test splits, stratification, and avoiding data leakage.

Guide coming soon
Dataset4 min

Negative Samples in Object Detection

When and how to include images without annotations in training datasets.

Guide coming soon