FishTrack23: An Ensemble Underwater Dataset for Multi-Object Tracking

Matthew Dawkins, Jack Prior, Bryon Lewis, Robin Faillettaz, Thompson Banez, Mary Salvi, Audrey Rollo, Julien Simon, Matthew Campbell, Matthew Lucero, Aashish Chaudhary, Benjamin Richards, Anthony Hoogs; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024, pp. 7167-7176

Tracking and classifying fish in optical underwater imagery presents several challenges which are encountered less frequently in terrestrial domains. Video may contain large schools comprised of many individuals, dynamic natural backgrounds, highly variable target scales, volatile collection conditions, and non-fish moving confusers including debris, marine snow, and other organisms. Additionally, there is a lack of large public datasets for algorithm evaluation available in this domain. The contributions of this paper is three fold. First, we present the FishTrack23 dataset which provides a large quantity of expert-annotated fish groundtruth tracks, in imagery and video collected across a range of different backgrounds, locations, collection conditions, and organizations. Approximately 850k bounding boxes across 26k tracks are included in the release of the ensemble, with potential for future growth in later releases. Second, we evaluate improvements upon baseline object detectors, trackers and classifiers on the dataset. Lastly, we integrate these methods into web and desktop interfaces to expedite annotation generation on new datasets.