Newfoundland Marine Refuge Fish Image Dataset with 24K Annotated Frames

2021 data from underwater cameras deployed at 400–500 m depths on the Northeast Newfoundland Slope contains 23,936 high-resolution images. Fisheries and Oceans Canada ecologists annotated bounding boxes and species labels for nine marine taxa, with images sampled from 185 five-minute videos. The dataset supports object detection and classification tasks for marine biology and computer vision.

Use Cases

• Train object detection models on 23,936 PNG images using YOLO-style CSV files containing bounding box coordinates and species labels.
• Analyze species co-occurrence and population density by counting bounding box annotations per image across the nine documented marine species.
• Develop background subtraction or negative sampling techniques using the included 3,000 randomly sampled negative (background) images.
• Study fine-grained fish classification by leveraging annotations for partially occluded and truncated individuals within the high-resolution frames.
• Reconstruct temporal sequences or video-level analysis by grouping images using filenames that encode the source video identifier and frame index.

Strengths

• 23,936 high-resolution (1920x1080 px) annotated images provide a substantial volume for training computer vision models.
• Annotations are consistent, with all labeling performed by a single Fisheries and Oceans Canada ecologist using the DIVE tool.
• Dataset includes 3,000 negative (background) images for robust model training and validation against false positives.
• Images are sampled from 185 distinct underwater videos, offering diversity in scene content and individual specimens.

Limitations

• Geographic coverage is limited to a small portion of the Northeast Newfoundland Slope Closure, reducing generalizability to other marine environments.
• Annotations are provided only in YOLO-style per-video CSV files, which may require conversion for use with other machine learning frameworks.
• The dataset is a curated subset from a larger corpus focused on seismic activity impacts, which may introduce sampling bias towards specific conditions or times.

Provenance

Source

Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Government of Canada Open Data Portal.

Collection Method

Collected using underwater video cameras mounted on baited crab pots deployed at 400–500 m depths.

Time Range

2021

Freshness

Data was collected in 2021 and the record was last updated in March 2026.

Geography

Northeast Newfoundland Slope Closure, Canada.