Building an web based image annotation tool - saving annotations to localStorage - html

Question

I am building a web application for annotating images. The work flow is as follows:
Select a project - using : action = list all sub-projects
Click on a sub-project : action = fetch all the images within-sub project
Display the images as a horizontal scrollable thumbnail gallery
Onclick image thumbnail from the gallery, display the larger image for annotation.
I am using canvas to display larger image. I have used another canvas as a layer to the first one, and I am able to draw rectangles using mouse over regions of interest. I am saving it locally. However, when I move on to the next image, the rectangle also gets carried to the next image.
My question is, instead of using just one layer, do I have to dynamically create as many canvas layers as I have in the annotation dataset. I am not sure because in each sub project I have around 8000-9000 images. Though I wont be annotating on all of them, still creating as many canvases as layers doesn't really sound good for me.
The following is the code:
HTML Canvas
<div class="body"> <!-- Canvas to display images begins -->
<canvas id="iriscanvas" width=700px height=700px style="position:absolute;margin:50px 0 0 0;z-index:1"></canvas>
<canvas id="regncanvas" onclick="draw(this, event)" width=700px height=700px style="position:absolute;margin:50px 0 0 0;z-index:2"></canvas>
</div> <!-- Canvas to display images ends -->
Step 4 given above: OnClick display thumbnail
function clickedImage(clicked_id) {
var clickedImg = document.getElementById(clicked_id).src;
var clickedImg = clickedImg.replace(/^.*[\\\/]/, '');
localStorage.setItem("clickedImg", clickedImg);
var canvas = document.getElementById("iriscanvas");
var ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
var thumbNails = document.getElementById("loaded_img_panel");
var pic = new Image();
pic.onload = function() {
ctx.drawImage(pic, 0,0)
}
thumbNails.addEventListener('click', function(event) {
pic.src = event.target.src;
});
}
Draw rectangles on second layer of canvas
window.onload=function(){
c=document.getElementById("regncanvas");
if (c) initCanvas(c);
};
function initCanvas(canvas){
// Load last canvas
loadLastCanvas(canvas);
}
function draw(canvas, event){
// Draw at random place
ctx=c.getContext("2d");
ctx.fillStyle="#ff0000";
ctx.beginPath();
ctx.fillRect (250*Math.random()+1, 220*Math.random()+1, 40, 30);
ctx.closePath();
ctx.fill();
// Save canvas
saveCanvas(canvas);
}
function saveCanvas(c){
localStorage['lastImgURI']=c.toDataURL("image/png");
}
function loadLastCanvas(c){
if (!localStorage['lastImgURI']) return;
img = new Image();
img.onload = function() {
ctx=c.getContext("2d");
ctx.drawImage(img, 0, 0, img.width, img.height);
};
img.src= localStorage['lastImgURI'];
}
Can someone guide me please?
The following is a screen grab of my application:

Answer 1

I have developed OCLAVI which is an image annotation tool with loads of features. It's still in beta but just after 3 weeks of release, it is gaining attraction quickly.
I have few advises for you.
HTML Canvas follow draw and forget strategy and every time redrawing the image is not a good idea. Be it 10 images or 10k, you should have one canvas for drawing the image and one canvas for drawing the shapes. Image canvas need be touched only when the image changes. Different shapes can share the same canvas.
You should integrate a data storage. Local storage is clearly not a good option to store this amount of data (especially if you have a team member who also would be annotating on the same image dataset.)
Isolate the code to a separate-separate file according to the shape. It will be very handy when you will think of adding support for Circle, Polygon, Cuboidal, Point interactions. Trust me following OOPs concepts will relive you from a lot of pain.
In terms of complexity
zooming with coordinates is easy
move with coordinates is of medium level difficulty
but you need to think with pen and paper to implement move on a zoomed image canvas (P.S. take care of the canvas flickering when the image moves
). How much the image can move in each direction also need to be calculated.
Take care of the image to canvas dimension ratio because at the end you need to have the coordinates scaled down to image level.
If your canvas size vs image size ratio is 1:1 then your job is simplified.
But this won't happen always because some images might be very small or very large to directly fit in window screen and you need to scale up and down accordingly.
The complexity increases if you like to use percentage width and height for canvas and your other team member annotating the image has a different screen size. So he drawing something will look something else on your screen.