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.
@misc{liu2021csiro,
title={The CSIRO Crown-of-Thorn Starfish Detection Dataset},
author={Jiajun Liu and Brano Kusy and Ross Marchant and Brendan Do and Torsten Merz and Joey Crosswell and Andy Steven and Nic Heaney and Karl von Richter and Lachlan Tychsen-Smith and David Ahmedt-Aristizabal and Mohammad Ali Armin and Geoffrey Carlin and Russ Babcock and Peyman Moghadam and Daniel Smith and Tim Davis and Kemal El Moujahid and Martin Wicke and Megha Malpani},
year={2021},
eprint={2111.14311},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CV}
}