NOAA Arctic Seals 2019

Overview

This dataset consists of around 80,000 color and IR (thermal) images, associated with flights conducted in Alaska by the NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center in 2019. Images have been annotated with around 28,000 bounding boxes (14,000 on color images, 14,000 on thermal images) on ice seals.

Data format

Metadata are provided as a .csv file, in which each row represents a detection (a bounding box on an RGB image and the corresponding thermal image); important columns include:

• detection_type: class associated with this bounding box, e.g. “ringed_seal”, “ringed_pup”
• rgb_left,rgb_right,rgb_top,rgb_bottom: bounding box location in absolute (pixel) coordinates on the RGB image; the origin of the bounding box is in the upper-left of the image, so “bottom” is the smaller of the two y coordinates, but represents the logical “top” of the bounding box
• ir_left,ir_right,ir_top,ir_bottom: bounding box location in absolute (pixel) coordinates on the IR image; the origin of the bounding box is in the upper-left of the image, so “bottom” is the smaller of the two y coordinates, but represents the logical “top” of the bounding box
• rgb_image_path: path to the RGB image associated with this detection within the blob container linked below
• ir_image_path: path to the IR image associated with this detection within the blob container linked below

Citation

If you use these data in a publication or report, please use the following citation:

Alaska Fisheries Science Center, 2021: A Dataset for Machine Learning Algorithm Development.

Contact information

For questions about this data set, contact Erin Moreland and Stacie Hardy at NOAA Fisheries.

License

This data set is released under the Community Data License Agreement (permissive variant).

Accessing the data

Annotations are available here:

A list of all files in the data set – including empty images with no annotations – is available here:

Images are available in the following cloud storage containers:

• gs://public-datasets-lila/noaa-kotz (GCP)
• s3://us-west-2.opendata.source.coop/agentmorris/lila-wildlife/noaa-kotz (AWS)
• https://lilawildlife.blob.core.windows.net/lila-wildlife/noaa-kotz (Azure)

We recommend downloading images (the whole folder, or a subset of the folder) using gsutil (for GCP), aws s3 (for AWS), or AzCopy (for Azure). For more information about using gsutil, aws s3, or AzCopy, check out our guidelines for accessing images without using giant zipfiles.

If you prefer to download images via http, you can. For example, the image referred to in the metadata file as:

…is available at any of the following URLs (one for each cloud):

Posted by Dan Morris.