Automated Quantification of Brittle Stars in Seabed Imagery Using Computer Vision Techniques.

Underwater video surveys play a significant role in marine benthic research. Usually, surveys are filmed in transects, which are stitched into 2D mosaic maps for further analysis. Due to the massive amount of video data and time-consuming analysis, the need for automatic image segmentation and quantitative evaluation arises. This paper investigates such techniques on annotated mosaic maps containing hundreds of instances of brittle stars. By harnessing a deep convolutional neural network with pre-trained weights and post-processing results with a common blob detection technique, we investigate the effectiveness and potential of such segment-and-count approach by assessing the segmentation and counting success. Discs could be recommended instead of full shape masks for brittle stars due to faster annotation among marker variants tested. Underwater image enhancement techniques could not improve segmentation results noticeably, but some might be useful for augmentation purposes.

A fully-annotated imagery dataset of sublittoral benthic species in Svalbard, Arctic.

Underwater imagery is widely used for a variety of applications in marine biology and environmental sciences, such as classification and mapping of seabed habitats, marine environment monitoring and impact assessment, biogeographic reconstructions in the context of climate change, etc. This approach is relatively simple and cost-effective, allowing the rapid collection of large amounts of data. However, due to the laborious and time-consuming manual analysis procedure, only a small part of the information stored in the archives of underwater images is retrieved. Emerging novel deep learning methods open up the opportunity for more effective, accurate and rapid analysis of seabed images than ever before. We present annotated images of the bottom macrofauna obtained from underwater video recorded in Spitsbergen island's European Arctic waters, Svalbard Archipelago. Our videos were filmed in both the photic and aphotic zones of polar waters, often influenced by melting glaciers. We used artificial lighting and shot close to the seabed (<1 m) to preserve natural colours and avoid the distorting effect of muddy water. The underwater video footage was captured using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) and a drop-down camera. The footage was converted to 2D mosaic images of the seabed. 2D mosaics were manually annotated by several experts using the Labelbox tool and co-annotations were refined using the SurveyJS platform. A set of carefully annotated underwater images associated with the original videos can be used by marine biologists as a biological atlas, as well as practitioners in the fields of machine vision, pattern recognition, and deep learning as training materials for the development of various tools for automatic analysis of underwater imagery.