what is RLE?

[isalirezag]

im new to this topic.
I understand the segmentation via polygons, but i dont know what RLE is?
Can anyone explain or guide me to a direction to learn more about it?
Any visual example, any explanation?

Thanks

[SamL98]

I believe RLE is run-length encoding. It is used to encode the location of foreground objects in segmentation. Instead of outputting a mask image, you give a list of start pixels and how many pixels after each of those starts are included in the mask. You can look on the submission section on this page for a specific example: https://www.kaggle.com/c/data-science-bowl-2018#evaluation

[dhirajsuvarna]

A great explanation of the coco file format along with detailed explanation of RLE and iscrowd - Coco file format

[analyticsbot]

A great explanation of the coco file format along with detailed explanation of RLE and iscrowd - Coco file format

this was indeed helpful.

[bit-scientist]

@dhirajsuvarna could you provide some annotation tools to load an image and annotate it to match with coco file format? Thanks.