Format Comparison
IR JSON
Lossless canonical format
COCO
Industry standard JSON format
YOLO
Ultralytics directory format
Pascal VOC
XML-based format with Annotations/
Label Studio
Task export JSON format
CVAT
XML export for images
TFOD CSV
TensorFlow CSV format
Format Matrix
| Format | Path Type | Read | Write | Lossiness vs IR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
ir-json | File (.json) | ✓ | ✓ | Lossless |
coco | File (.json) | ✓ | ✓ | Conditional |
yolo | Directory (images/ + labels/) | ✓ | ✓ | Lossy |
voc | Directory (Annotations/ + JPEGImages/) | ✓ | ✓ | Lossy |
label-studio | File (.json) | ✓ | ✓ | Lossy |
cvat | File (.xml) or directory (annotations.xml) | ✓ | ✓ | Lossy |
tfod | File (.csv) | ✓ | ✓ | Lossy |
Lossiness Matrix
What gets preserved when converting from each format to IR:| Feature | IR JSON | COCO | YOLO | VOC | Label Studio | CVAT | TFOD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dataset info | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | – | – | – |
| Licenses | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | – | – | – |
| Image metadata | ✓ | ✓ | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – |
| Bounding boxes | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Category names | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Supercategory | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | – | – | – |
| Confidence/score | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | ✓ | – | – |
| Annotations attributes | ✓ | Partial | – | ✓ | Partial | ✓ | – |
| Images without annotations | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – |
| Rotation | – | – | – | – | Flattened | – | – |
Coordinate Systems
Each format uses different coordinate conventions:- IR JSON: Pixel-space XYXY
[xmin, ymin, xmax, ymax] - COCO: Pixel-space XYWH
[x, y, width, height](top-left corner + dimensions) - YOLO: Normalized center-width-height
[cx, cy, w, h](0..1 range) - Pascal VOC: Pixel-space XYXY
[xmin, ymin, xmax, ymax] - Label Studio: Percentage-based
[x, y, width, height](0..100 range) - CVAT: Pixel-space top-left/bottom-right
[xtl, ytl, xbr, ybr] - TFOD CSV: Normalized XYXY
[xmin, ymin, xmax, ymax](0..1 range)
Next Steps
IR JSON Format
Learn about the canonical lossless format
COCO Format
Industry standard for object detection
YOLO Format
Popular training format
Pascal VOC
Classic XML-based format