A research tool for long-term and continuous analysis of fish assemblage in coral-reefs using underwater camera footage

TLDR

Fish monitoring via continuous video can reveal changes in abundance and composition over time and area, yet manual examination of such data is infeasible. The study introduces a tool that enables marine ecologists to analyze long‑term, continuous fish monitoring videos. The system automates continuous video recording, analysis, and result presentation, handling massive data volumes and offering ecologists multiple verification options through adjustable certainty levels and software version comparisons. The tool has processed about a year of footage with over 4 million fish observations, enabling marine ecologists to analyze long‑term, continuous underwater video records for the first time.

Abstract

We present a research tool that supports marine ecologists' research by allowing analysis of long-term and continuous fish monitoring video content. The analysis can be used for instance to discover ecological phenomena such as changes in fish abundance and species composition over time and area. Two characteristics set our system apart from traditional ecological data collecting and processing methods. First, the continuous video recording results in enormous data volumes of monitoring data. Currently around a year of video recordings (containing over the 4 million fish observations) have been processed. Second, different from traditional manual recording and analysing the ecological data, the whole recording, analysing and presentation of results is automated in this system. On one hand, it saves the effort of manually examining every video, which is infeasible. On the other hand, no automatic video analysis method is perfect, so the user interface provides marine ecologists with multiple options to verify the data. Marine ecologists can examine the underlying videos, check results of automatic video analysis at different certainty levels computed by our system, and compare results generated by multiple versions of automatic video analysis software to verify the data in our system. This research tool enables marine ecologists for the first time to analyse long-term and continuous underwater video records.