BIIGLE4Beginners: A New Online Tutorial for Image and Video Annotation

A new self-study course now allows users to learn how to work with BIIGLE step by step and at their own pace. Using real sample data, the free course provides a hands-on introduction to the complete annotation workflow.

BIIGLE has been part of the NFDI4Biodiversity service portfolio for several years. The service helps researchers annotate objects in images and videos, generating statistically analyzable, machine-readable data for biodiversity research. The new online tutorial “BIIGLE4Beginners” – meaning “BIIGLE for beginners” – now offers a practical, step-by-step introduction to the software.

Learning by Doing

BIIGLE4Beginners is an interactive online tutorial that guides new users through the entire image and video annotation workflow – from setting up an account to exporting the finished data. Across eight chapters, learners set up their BIIGLE account, create and manage an annotation project, build their own vocabulary for annotation, and upload files. Through hands-on exercises, they annotate images and videos before exporting their annotation data.

The tutorial uses real sample data, including still images and video footage. This allows learners to immediately gain a feel for working with exactly the kinds of data BIIGLE was designed to handle. The tutorial is available free of charge via the Training eSupport System (TeSS) of the European life sciences infrastructure ELIXIR: https://tess.elixir-europe.org/materials/biigle-for-beginners

Developed with Support from NFDI4Biodiversity

The BIIGLE4Beginners tutorial was created as part of NFDI4Biodiversity’s activities related to Open Educational Resources (OER). Throughout its development, the team provided feedback on the tutorial’s content and contributed established guidelines for creating OER. This helped shape the course into a clearly structured, self-contained learning module that complements other open educational resources available to the biodiversity research community.

About BIIGLE

BIIGLE is web-based open-source software for annotating objects in images and videos, developed and maintained at Bielefeld University. The publicly accessible instance at biigle.de is used by more than 6,000 researchers in over 40 countries to annotate imagery from marine and terrestrial ecosystems as well as microscopy images. More than 45 million annotations have been created to date.

The continued development of BIIGLE is supported by the Bielefeld Institute for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (BIBI) and the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI). Both are partners in the NFDI4Biodiversity network, which comprises around 60 institutions. The software’s source code is openly developed on GitHub.