Paper ID: 2111.14311

The CSIRO Crown-of-Thorn Starfish Detection Dataset

Jiajun Liu, Brano Kusy, Ross Marchant, Brendan Do, Torsten Merz, Joey Crosswell, Andy Steven, Nic Heaney, Karl von Richter, Lachlan Tychsen-Smith, David Ahmedt-Aristizabal, Mohammad Ali Armin, Geoffrey Carlin, Russ Babcock, Peyman Moghadam, Daniel Smith, Tim Davis, Kemal El Moujahid, Martin Wicke, Megha Malpani

Crown-of-Thorn Starfish (COTS) outbreaks are a major cause of coral loss on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and substantial surveillance and control programs are underway in an attempt to manage COTS populations to ecologically sustainable levels. We release a large-scale, annotated underwater image dataset from a COTS outbreak area on the GBR, to encourage research on Machine Learning and AI-driven technologies to improve the detection, monitoring, and management of COTS populations at reef scale. The dataset is released and hosted in a Kaggle competition that challenges the international Machine Learning community with the task of COTS detection from these underwater images.

Submitted: Nov 29, 2021