Digi4ECO additions to the Smartbay Marine Species Object Detection Training dataset

Training Dataset The SmartBay Observatory in Galway Bay is an important contribution by Ireland to the growing global network of real-time data capture systems deployed within the ocean – technology giving us new insights into the ocean which we have not had before.The observatory was installed on the seafloor 1.5km off the coast of Spiddal, County Galway, Ireland . The observatory uses cameras, probes and sensors to permit continuous and remote live underwater monitoring. This observatory equipment allows ocean researchers unique real-time access to monitor ongoing changes in the marine environment. Data relating to the marine environment at the site is transferred in real-time from the SmartBay Observatory through a fibre optic telecommunications cable to the Marine Institute headquarters and onwards onto the internet. The data includes a live video stream, the depth of the observatory node, the sea temperature and salinity, and estimates of the chlorophyll and turbidity levels in the water which give an indication of the volume of phytoplankton and other particles, such as sediment, in the water. The DIGI4ECO project has added additional Image Annotations captured from video sequences to the Smartbay Marine Species Object Detection training Dataset created by the iMagine project. The DIGI4ECO annotations have been added to the original iMagine Bounding Box Annotated image dataset, this data is formatted in YOLOv8 format and can be used to Train a YOLOv8 Object Detection Model. Such models can be used to detect the species object classes of the Marine Fauna observed in the Smartbay Observatory Video footage using species names. The imagery used in this training dataset consists of image frame captures from the Smartbay video Archive files, CC-BY imagery from the www.minka-sdg.org website and images taken by Eva Cullen in the "Galway Atlantaquaria" Aquarium in Galway, Ireland.The imagery were annotated using CVAT, collated on Roboflow and exported in YOLOv8 training dataset format.