Sharks and rays swimming in a large public aquarium

Large Public Aquaria are complex ecosystems that require constant monitoring to detect and correct anomalies that may affect the habitat and their species. Many of those anomalies can be directly or indirectly spotted by monitoring the behavior of fish. This can be a quite laborious task to be done by biologists alone. Automated fish tracking methods, specially of the non-intrusive type, can help biologists in the timely detection of such events. These systems require annotated data of fish to be trained. We used footage collected from the main aquarium of Oceanário de Lisboa to create a novel dataset with fish annotations from the shark and ray species. The dataset has the following characteristics:

66 shark training tracks with a total of 15812 bounding boxes
88 shark testing tracks with a total of 15978 bounding boxes
133 ray training tracks with a total of 28168 bounding boxes
192 ray testing tracks with a total of 31529 bounding boxes

The training set corresponds to a calm environment where fish swim slowly. On the other hand, the test set is a challenging environment where divers enter the tank to feed the fish causing a frenzy.

Methods
The dataset was collected using a stationary camera positioned outside the main tank of Oceanário de Lisboa aiming at the fish.

Additionally, this data was processed using the CVAT annotation tool to create the sharks and rays annotations.