Automated detection of whales in aerial imagery

遥感，即从卫星或空中平台捕捉和处理地球表面的图像，可以有效地对广阔的地球区域进行科学监测。例如，遥感对于监测鲸鱼数量至关重要。鲸鱼在生物和环境上对加拿大很重要，是粮食安全的一部分，对因纽特人来说也具有文化和经济上的重要性。尽管许多图像可以快速捕获，但人工处理一次鲸鱼野外调查中通过航空捕获的数千张图像需要一年时间。我们的研究致力于使用自动计算机视觉算法来加快这一过程。这项任务具有挑战性，因为鲸鱼很少被观察到，相对于图像大小，鲸鱼的尺寸很小，而且由于不可预测的海洋外观，鲸鱼的外表往往不清楚。用于计算机辅助处理和分析大容量复杂图像的新型机器学习模型可以用于执行自动鲸鱼种群计数，从而更高效和一致地处理调查图像数据。将在改进捕捉视觉线索以识别可能是鲸鱼的方面取得进展，并将利用先验知识来区分鲸鱼和长相相似的鲸鱼的上下文感知方法。这些新方法将有助于开发用于在野外调查图像中识别鲸鱼的遥感软件和分析解决方案。这些方法还可以支持海洋监测应用中的其他遥感目标检测和分类任务。

Remote sensing, or capturing and processing images of the earth's surface from satellite or aerial platforms, can efficiently allow scientific monitoring of vast earth regions. As an example, remote sensing is essential for monitoring whale populations. Whales are biologically and environmentally important to Canada and part of food security as well as culturally and economically important for Inuit. Although many images can be captured quickly, a year is required to manually process the 1000s of images aerially captured in a single whale field survey. Our research endeavors to use automated computer vision algorithms to expedite this process. This task is challenging due to infrequent observation of whales, the small size of the whale relative to the image size, and the often unclear whale appearance due to the unpredictable ocean appearance. Novel machine learning models for computer-aided processing and analysis of the large-volume complex images can be used to perform automated whale population counts, and thereby process survey image data more efficiently and consistently. Advancements will be made with respect to improved capture of visual cues to identify what could be a whale and context-aware methods using prior knowledge to distinguish whales from look-alikes. These new methods will facilitate the development of remote sensing software and analytic solutions for whale identification in field survey images. The methods can then also support other remote sensing target detection and classification tasks in ocean monitoring applications.