The 3rd Edition of the ImageCLEF Coral Annotation Challenge 2021

Data

Advances in automatically annotating images for complexity and benthic composition have been promising, and we are interested in automatically identify areas of interest and to label them appropriately for monitoring coral reefs. Coral reefs are in danger of being lost within the next 30 years, and with them the ecosystems they support. This catastrophe will not only see the extinction of many marine species, but also create a humanitarian crisis on a global scale for the billions of humans who rely on reef services. By monitoring the changes and composition of coral reefs we can help prioritise conservation efforts.

New for 2021:

in its 3rd edition, the training and test data will form the complete set of images required to form a 3D reconstruction of the environment. This allows the participants to explore novel probabilistic computer vision techniques based around image overlap and transposition of data points. Participants will be given instruction on the preparation of 3D reconstruction, the output files (.obj) and a visualisation of each model without labels (for example, https://skfb.ly/6SooQ).

In addition, participants are encourage to use the publicly available NOAA NCEI data to train their approaches. 

Challenge description

Participants will be require to annotate and localise coral reef images by labelling the images with types of benthic substrate together. Each image is provided with possible class types. 

Data

The data for this task originates from a growing, large-scale collection of images taken from coral reefs around the world as part of a coral reef monitoring project with the Marine Technology Research Unit at the University of Essex.
Substrates of the same type can have very different morphologies, color variation and patterns. Some of the images contain a white line (scientific measurement tape) that may occlude part of the entity. The quality of the images is variable, some are blurry, and some have poor color balance. This is representative of the Marine Technology Research Unit dataset and all images are useful for data analysis. The images contain annotations of the following 13 types of substrates: Hard Coral – Branching, Hard Coral – Submassive, Hard Coral – Boulder, Hard Coral – Encrusting, Hard Coral – Table, Hard Coral – Foliose, Hard Coral – Mushroom, Soft Coral, Soft Coral – Gorgonian, Sponge, Sponge – Barrel, Fire Coral – Millepora and Algae – Macro or Leaves.
The test data contains images from four different locations:

• same location as training set
• similar location to training set
• geographically similar to training set
• geographically distinct from training set

Important dates

• 16.11.2020: registration opens for all ImageCLEF tasks
• 01.03.2021: development data released
• 22.04.2021: test data release starts
• 07.05.2021: deadline for submitting the participants runs
• 28.05.2021: deadline for submission of working notes papers by the participants
• 21-24.09.2021: CLEF 2021, Bucharest, Romania

Participant Registration

https://www.imageclef.org/2021#registration

Organizing Committee

• Jon Chamberlain <jchamb(at)essex.ac.uk>,University of Essex, UK
• Thomas A. Oliver <thomas.oliver(at)noaa.gov>, NOAA/ US IOOS, USA
• Hassan Moustahfid <hassan.moustahfid(at)noaa.gov>, NOAA/ US IOOS, USA
• Antonio Campello <a.campello(at)wellcome.ac.uk>,Wellcome Trust, UK
• Adrian Clark <alien(at)essex.ac.uk>,University of Essex, UK
• Alba García Seco de Herrera <alba.garcia(at)essex.ac.uk>,University of Essex, UK

For more details and updates, please visit the task website at: https://www.imageclef.org/2021/coral 

And join our mailing list: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/imageclefcoral