Design And Implementation Of Online Collaboration System Based On Image Annotation

With the rapid development of Internet and Web technology, a growing number of academic papers are published in the form of multimedia on the Web. This simple form, however, is difficult to meet the demand for researchers discussing images in papers in high efficiency. Currently, there is no product in the scientific research area which meets both image annotation and online collaboration function. This paper analyzes the demands of scientific researchers for image annotation reviews and online multiplayer real-time communication for the first time. Then we designed and implemented an online collaborative system based on image annotation to solve the researchers’ problems.Essentially, the system designed in this paper is an Web system based on Browser/Server structure. The back-end uses LNMP(Linux+Nginx+MySQL+PHP) architecture, which is very popular nowadays. The front-end uses the latest HTML5 and Node.js technology. The system mainly consists of the following three major functional modules: module of creating a discussion group, in which the sponsor can create a private room, upload images and invite other people to discuss the images; module of image annotation, which adopted open source OpenSeadragon engine and the self-developed jQuery plugin, has realized the functions of multiple image viewing, switch, scaling, annotating; module of online collaboration, which respectively uses the WebSocket protocol to implement online chat, and the WebRTC technology to implement online video conference. After a series of development, and after passing through rigorous functional testing and performance testing, the system was deployed and put into practical use. It has been stable operation for one year.The system designed and implemented in this paper, can be used by the researchers to annotate and remark the images in their papers, and communicate online in real-time. In addition, the underlying system uses a separating front and back ends based on REST API architecture. The system is also deployed at a third party cloud platforms, with strong flexibility, scalability, ease of maintenance, and convenient support for the corresponding APP.