Welcome to the April edition of the CVAT Digest. This month, we focused on practical updates that make annotation faster, cloud-backed storage workflows easier to manage, and everyday UI interactions smoother.

The updates in this digest were shipped across v2.62.0, v2.63.0, and v2.64.0.

What’s new

Simplify polygons and polylines faster

We introduced polygon and polyline simplification, making it easier to reduce the number of points in existing shapes. It can be applied from the object menu for a single object or through annotation actions for multiple objects at once.

This is especially useful when annotations become too dense or overly detailed. Instead of manually cleaning up point-heavy shapes, annotators can simplify them quickly while preserving the overall shape.

Better defaults for SAM-assisted annotation

Bounding boxes are now used as the default prompt for SAM models instead of points. In many annotation scenarios, boxes are a more natural starting point and can help speed up interaction.

Default backing cloud storage for new tasks

CVAT can now be configured to store all new eligible tasks on a selected backing cloud storage by default.

For teams working with larger datasets or cloud-first pipelines, this removes setup friction and makes task storage behavior more predictable from the start. It is a useful improvement for admins who want more consistent storage workflows across projects.

Public visibility for native functions in the CLI

The CLI function create-native command now supports creating functions with public visibility.

For teams using native functions as shared building blocks in CVAT workflows, this makes setup more flexible and reduces manual follow-up when exposing functions to a broader group of users.

Updated

More practical tools for task migration

The task migration commands for backing cloud storage are now more flexible and easier to manage. You can load a list of tasks from a file, and the commands now print transfer statistics as they run.

This makes bulk migration workflows more convenient, especially for teams moving larger batches of tasks or standardizing storage after project setup.

Small UI improvements that reduce friction

We also shipped several smaller interface updates that improve day-to-day usability:

• Snap to contour and Snap to point were moved into the controls sidebar, making these tools easier to discover and access while annotating.
• A success notification is now shown after saving an annotation guide.
• The “Remove annotations” flow is now more user-friendly.
• Text scaling during double-click zoom was improved.
• Skeleton point state items are now easier to read on the canvas.

Other improvements

April also included a number of reliability and maintenance updates. These include stricter validation for organization-aware Rego policy filters, better handling for backing cloud storage tasks, preservation of annotation scores in backups, and point cloud fixes for .bin files and intensity handling.

While these changes are less visible than the feature updates above, they help make CVAT more reliable in production environments.