Welcome to the 2nd Workshop on Computer Vision for Analysis of Underwater Imagery (CVAUI 2016)!

Workshop Overview

Monitoring marine ecosystems is of critical importance for gaining a better understanding of their complexity, including the effects of climate change and other anthropogenic influences on marine environments.

Recently, oceanographic data acquisition has been greatly facilitated by the establishment of seafloor cabled observatories whose co-located sensors facilitate interdisciplinary studies and real-time observations. Traditional oceanographic research involved mostly ship-based sampling and autonomous deployments. These methods offer only a limited temporal sampling of complex underwater phenomena. Prior to the advent of cabled observatories, the majority of deep-sea video data was acquired by ROVs (remotely operated vehicles), and was analyzed and annotated manually. In contrast, seafloor cabled observatories such those operated by Ocean Networks Canada (www.oceannetworks.ca) offer a 24/7 presence, resulting in unprecedented volumes of visual data. Scheduled recordings of underwater video data and static images are gathered with Internet-connected fixed and PTZ cameras, which observe a variety of biological processes.

The analysis of underwater imagery imposes a series of unique challenges, which need to be tackled by the computer vision community in collaboration with biologists and ocean scientists. We invite submissions from all areas of computer vision and image analysis relevant for, or applied to, underwater image analysis. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• underwater image enhancement
• physical models of reflectance and light transport
• underwater scene understanding
• classification, detection, segmentation
• autonomous underwater navigation
• detection and monitoring of marine life
• automated analysis for fisheries research
• object tracking
• automatic video annotation and summarization
• context-aware machine learning and image understanding

Call for Papers

Download the Call for Papers here.