The BeachLitter dataset for image segmentation of beach litter

This dataset consists of 3500 images of beach litter and 3500 corresponding pixel-wise labelled images. Although performing such pixel-by-pixel semantic masking is expensive, it allows us to build machine-learning models that can perform more sophisticated automated visual processing. We believe this dataset may be of significance to the scientific communities concerned with marine pollution and computer vision, as this dataset can be used for benchmarking in the tasks involving the evaluation of marine pollution with various machine learning models. The beach litter images were obtained from coastal environment surveys conducted between 2011 and 2019 by the Yamagata Prefectural Government, Japan. These images were originally obtained owing to the reporting guidelines concerning regular coastal-environmental-cleanup and beach-litter-monitoring surveys. Based on these images, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology created 3500 images comprising eight classes of semantic masks for beach litter detection