A research tool for long-term and continuous analysis of fish assemblage in coral-reefs using underwater camera footage

Abstract

We present a research tool that supports marine ecologists' research by allowing analysis of long-term and continuous fish monitoring video content. The analysis can be used for instance to discover ecological phenomena such as changes in fish abundance and species composition over time and area. Two characteristics set our system apart from traditional ecological data collecting and processing methods. First, the continuous video recording results in enormous data volumes of monitoring data. Currently around a year of video recordings (containing over the 4 million fish observations) have been processed. Second, different from traditional manual recording and analysing the ecological data, the whole recording, analysing and presentation of results is automated in this system. On one hand, it saves the effort of manually examining every video, which is infeasible. On the other hand, no automatic video analysis method is perfect, so the user interface provides marine ecologists with multiple options to verify the data. Marine ecologists can examine the underlying videos, check results of automatic video analysis at different certainty levels computed by our system, and compare results generated by multiple versions of automatic video analysis software to verify the data in our system. This research tool enables marine ecologists for the first time to analyse long-term and continuous underwater video records.

A camera‐based method for estimating absolute density in animals displaying home range behaviour

“…The technological advances in wildlife imaging have opened at least two new challenges and opportunities: developing novel algorithms for data mining and automated image interpretation (Aguzzi et al., ; Boom et al., ; Díaz‐Gil et al., ; reviewed in Dell et al., ) and fostering theoretical links between the patterns depicted by cameras and absolute animal density. Here, we focus on this second challenge because there continues to be debate on which method and camera metric should be preferred.…”

Scaling up Ecological Measurements of Coral Reefs Using Semi-Automated Field Image Collection and Analysis

“…Such methods, which typically rely on machine learning to map visual attributes of images to semantic classes, are enabling marine scientists to extract useful ecological data from photographic records [30][31][32] at speeds significantly faster than manual methods [24]. Furthermore, the development of photographic sensors and computer vision methods has enabled integration of new approaches in coral reef ecology to quantify a range of other metrics relevant to the discipline (e.g., reef terrain complexity [33,34] and fish abundance [35]). …”

MotionMeerkat: integrating motion video detection and ecological monitoring

“…; Boom et al . ). Embracing these opportunities can revolutionize the scale of biological observations and allow scientists to increase spatial and temporal data collection.…”

“…The emergence of powerful software tools makes image analysis a viable option for decreasing review time and storage space (Boom et al . ). The goal of MotionMeerkat is to reduce video data to a reasonable pool of potentially important frames.…”