Product Updates [January 2024]

Happy New Year 2024! We put our heads down in January for a fashionably late new years welcome party. Check out below to see everything we’ve prepared, including:

• New Home Page and Onboarding
• A new way to manage your data
• Workflows Usability Enhancements
• DICOM MPR Annotations and other improvements
• Simple and intuitive Encord Active imports

Welcome to Encord

Opening the new year with a new home page with points directly Projects, Datasets and Ontologies — you’re never more on than one click away from creating any necessary entities. Of course, you can continue to do so from the relevant list pages as well. We’ve also introduced in-context documentation and explainers after performing various key actions to give you the information you need when you need it. Welcome to the new year, and welcome to Encord!

Interact and manage your data directly

Registering and indexing your data into your annotation platform is a critical step on your journey to a first-class AI application. Making sure your cloud integrations are front and center helps easily manage all your data sources. Read about it here.

You’ll notice Datasets and Integrations appearing under a new section — Index! We’re working with select customers on the new Storage application to manage your data directly. Storage allows you to step past Datasets and interact with every file registered on Encord directly. Global file search, tracking and assigning dataset membership, and the ability to organize files into folders to suit your purpose are some of the initial features we’re rolling out. Contact us at support@encord.com to be part of the early cohort helping us develop and iterate how you manage your data! Get up to speed with the Storage explainer, here.

Workflows Usability Enhancements

We upgraded Workflows to the default task management system at the end of last year, and have continued to add functionality and scale. Creating workflow projects now happens in one simple interface — from 1,2,3,4 to 1 and done! We’ve also added several popular features. You can now change task routing on percentage routers after project creation, and annotators can skip difficult tasks and conveniently leave a comment for project managers to understand what is happening.

We’ve also made it possible to update priorities and attach comments in bulk via the SDK making it possible to scale these operations to many thousands of tasks quickly.

Smooth Integration Of Encord Active and Annotate

The import process has been split into 4 separate stages to give you quicker access to useful features and enable you to start working with Active within minutes instead of hours. Choose between Data, labels, Embeddings, and Quality metrics to start your curation or label validation workflow.

We’ve also enhanced the integration going from Active to Annotate as well. You can now adjust task priorities and comments from Active in bulk to optimize your annotation workflows ensuring the most high-value data gets annotated first. Use priorities and comments to surface the most important data and instructions to your annotation team — making the most of your resources and your team’s time.

Finally, bulk classification allows you to classify multiple images or frames simultaneously, accelerating some classification workloads from hours to minutes. Combined with a foundation model such as CLIP this feature is powerful at classifying the simpler classes in your ontology before your annotation teams handle the details.

Encord Active: Search Anything and Look Good Doing It

Take your dataset querying to the next level with Search Anything! Building on the success of our natural language search feature, we're excited to introduce a new dimension to your search capabilities. Our latest feature, Search Anything, uses embeddings-based search technology to find images in your dataset that closely resemble an external image you provide. Simply drag and drop your chosen external image into Encord Active whereafter our algorithms will match it against your dataset, quickly and accurately identifying the most similar images for your review. For when you can’t describe an image, let the image describe itself!

Upcoming Webinar

Vision Language Models Webinar

February 29th at 9am PST / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT

Learn about how models like LLaVA and GPT-4 Vision can aid your annotation projects.

Register now

Frederik Hvilshøj

Lead Machine Learning Engineer

Justin Sharps

Head of Product Engineering

Register now

DICOM Improvements

We’ve redoubled our efforts in making the DICOM annotation tool fit your workload. To start off the year, we’re quite pleased to be rolling out increased access to not one but two foundational improvements to our DICOM tool. Regardless of your modality (x-ray, CT, MRI, etc) — we’ve updated our recently introduced all new rendering engine. We’ve seen performance increases surpassing 3x loading time improvements with our recent changes and are very excited to be making it available. We’ve also added functionality to the MPR brush capabilities — the default mode is to annotate one slice at a time using the 2D brush, but you can also select the 3D brush mode to annotate on multiple slices at once. Refer to the reconstructed view documentation for the details and best practices. Contact us if you’re interested to hear more and help be part of the roll-out period.

You can now also utilize our custom overlay feature to make your annotation experience as convenient as possible. Custom overlays allow you to control what DICOM information is conveniently surfaced and always visible in the editor interface. This means you won’t have to browse the metadata to find the information you need to annotate with accuracy! Full instructions and illustrations available in the documentation.

Thanks for reading — as always, the inbox at product@encord.com is always open — we’d love to hear your thoughts on the feedback on the above! Talk to you soon!