Phrase Grounding

Draw bounding boxes and link them to text descriptions to build phrase grounding training data for your VLM.

Before You Start

Phrase grounding annotations teach your vision-language model (VLM) to locate objects by their text description. Each annotation pairs a written caption with bounding boxes, where specific phrases in the caption link to the boxes they describe. This guide walks through creating those annotations in Datature Vi.


Open the annotator

Go to your dataset, then click the Annotate tab. Click any image thumbnail in the bottom strip to load it onto the canvas.

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Open the Annotator tab

Open the Annotator tab

From the Dataset Overview page, click the Annotator tab to open the labeling interface.

You should see
Dataset Overview showing image and annotation count, and heatmaps showing annotation patterns

Your annotations are ready when you see annotation count matching the image count, and heatmaps showing annotation patterns.


Keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts

Key
Action

Annotation guidelines

These guidelines produce annotations that train well. Inconsistent annotations train poorly regardless of quantity.


Edit or delete annotations

You can modify or remove annotations at any time.

To edit a caption: Press T, click in the text area, make your changes. Changes save automatically.

To resize or reposition a box: Click the box, then drag it or drag a handle. The phrase link stays connected.

To delete a box: Press D, then click the box. The box and its phrase link are removed. The caption text remains.

To unlink a phrase: Press D, then click the highlighted phrase in the caption. The highlight and link are removed, but the box and caption text remain.

Deletions Cannot Be Undone

Deleted boxes and phrase links cannot be recovered. Export your dataset regularly as a backup.


Chain-of-thought reasoning


Next steps


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