Man and the Machine: Effects of AI-assisted Human Labeling on Interactive Annotation of Real-Time Video Streams

AI-assisted interactive annotation is a powerful way to facilitate data annotation – a prerequisite for constructing robust AI models. While AI-assisted interactive annotation has been extensively studied in static settings, less is known about its usage in dynamic scenarios where the annotators operate under time and cognitive constraints, e.g., while detecting suspicious or dangerous activities from real-time surveillance feeds. Understanding how AI can assist annotators in these tasks and facilitate consistent annotation is paramount to ensure high performance for AI models trained on these data. We address this gap in interactive machine learning (IML) research, contributing an extensive investigation of the benefits, limitations, and challenges of AI-assisted annotation in dynamic application use cases. We address both the effects of AI on annotators and the effects of (AI) annotations on the performance of AI models trained on annotated data in real-time video annotations. We conduct extensive experiments that compare annotation performance at two annotator levels (expert and non-expert) and two interactive labelling techniques (with and without AI-assistance). In a controlled study with N = 34 annotators and a follow up study with 51963 images and their annotation labels being input to the AI model, we demonstrate that the benefits of AI-assisted models are greatest for non-expert users and for cases where targets are only partially or briefly visible. The expert users tend to outperform or achieve similar performance as AI model. Labels combining AI and expert annotations result in the best overall performance as the AI reduces overflow and latency in the expert annotations. We derive guidelines for the use of AI-assisted human annotation in real-time dynamic use cases.