Abstract
Marine imaging has evolved from small, narrowly focussed applications to large-scale applications covering areas of several hundred square kilometers or time series covering observation periods of several months. The analysis and interpretation of the accumulating large volume of digital images or videos will continue to challenge the marine science community to keep this process efficient and effective. It is safe to say that any strategy will rely on some software platform supporting manual image and video annotation, either for a direct manual annotation-based analysis or for collecting training data to deploy a machine learning–based approach for (semi-)automatic annotation. This paper describes how computer-assisted manual full-frame image and video annotation is currently performed in marine science and how it can evolve to keep up with the increasing demand for image and video annotation and the growing volume of imaging data. As an example, observations are presented how the image and video annotation tool BIIGLE 2.0 has been used by an international community of more than one thousand users in the last 4 years. In addition, new features and tools are presented to show how BIIGLE 2.0 has evolved over the same time period: video annotation, support for large images in the gigapixel range, machine learning assisted image annotation, improved mobility and affordability, application instance federation and enhanced label tree collaboration. The observations indicate that, despite novel concepts and tools introduced by BIIGLE 2.0, full-frame image and video annotation is still mostly done in the same way as two decades ago, where single users annotated subsets of image collections or single video frames with limited computational support. We encourage researchers to review their protocols for education and annotation, making use of newer technologies and tools to improve the efficiency and effectivity of image and video annotation in marine science.
Highlights
Marine imaging is an increasingly important technique for environmental monitoring and exploration of the oceans (Solan et al, 2003; Bicknell et al, 2016; Durden et al, 2016b)
The usage statistics indicate how image annotation is currently performed with a tool such as BIIGLE and how image annotation tools as well as the marine imaging community could further evolve
The users created more than 8.4 Million image annotations on more than 1.2 Million images and almost 240,000 video annotations on more than 830 h of video material
Summary
Marine imaging is an increasingly important technique for environmental monitoring and exploration of the oceans (Solan et al, 2003; Bicknell et al, 2016; Durden et al, 2016b). Marine imaging data is traditionally analyzed through manual image annotation by marine biologists and other domain experts In this context, image annotation refers to the assignment of labels (e.g., a species name selected from a certain taxonomy) to points or regions in a full-frame image or video (in contrast to part-frame imaging such as pre-segmented pelagic imaging) (Durden et al, 2016a; Schoening et al, 2016). Image annotation refers to the assignment of labels (e.g., a species name selected from a certain taxonomy) to points or regions in a full-frame image or video (in contrast to part-frame imaging such as pre-segmented pelagic imaging) (Durden et al, 2016a; Schoening et al, 2016) This is a time-consuming and error-prone task (Culverhouse et al, 2003; Schoening et al, 2012; Seiler et al, 2012). As a consequence of the rapidly increasing rates at which marine imaging data is acquired today and the highly limited availability of domain experts, time-consuming purely manual image annotation is no longer acceptable as the only method of analysis
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