Overview
The FishEye project, funded by MIT Sea Grant, develops computer vision tools to detect, track, and count river herring (alewife (alosa pseudoharengus and blueback alosa aestivalis) in Massachusetts rivers using underwater video footage. Cameras were deployed in river herring migration season between March and June at three locations:
- Coonamessett River, Falmouth, MA, USA (collected in 2024)
- Ipswich River, Ipswich, MA, USA (collected between 2015 and 2018)
- Santuit River, Mashpee, MA, USA (collected in 2024)
This dataset was developed from 1,434 video clips, comprising a total of ~262k frames, with ~91k bounding boxes annotated on ~60k of those frames (the remaining ~162k frames were reviewed and classified as empty). While ~80% of annotations are river herring, the dataset also includes other species (trout, bass, perch, eel, sunfish, lamprey). Objects or fish that could not be confidently classified were labeled as “unknown fish.” Daytime (~65%) and nighttime (~35%) conditions are represented. Alewife and blueback herring are not distinguished in labeling; both are labeled as “river herring”.
Citation, license, and contact information
For questions about this data set, contact Robert Vincent and Zhongqi Chen.
This data set is released under the Community Data License Agreement (permissive variant).
Data format
Annotations are provided in COCO format.
Downloading the data
Metadata is available here.
