OOS 10-6 - Ocean Vision AI: Accelerating the processing of underwater visual data for marine ecological monitoring

In order to fully explore our ocean and effectively steward the life that lives there, we need to scale up our observational capabilities both in time and space. Marine biological observations and surveys of the future call for building distributed networks of underwater sensors, vehicles, and data analysis pipelines, which requires significant advances in automation. Underwater imaging, a major sensing modality for marine biology, is being deployed on a diverse array of platforms, however the community faces a data analysis backlog that artificial intelligence and machine learning may be able to address. How can we leverage novel computer and data science tools to automate image and video analysis in the ocean? How can we create workflows, data pipelines, and hardware/software tools that will enable novel research themes to expand our understanding of the ocean and its inhabitants in a time of great change? Ocean Vision AI (OVAI) seeks to address these community needs. OVAI will provide a central hub for researchers using imaging, AI, open data, and hardware/software; create data pipelines from existing image and video data repositories; provide project tools for coordination; leverage public participation and engagement via gamification; and data products that are widely shared. Products being developed by OVAI include the OVAI Portal, an underwater labeled image database FathomNet, and a community science gaming app FathomVerse. Together, OVAI will be used to directly accelerate the automated analysis of underwater visual data to enable scientists, explorers, policymakers, storytellers, and the public, to learn, understand, and care more about the life that inhabits our ocean.