mbariml: a curation pipeline for turning deep-sea imagery and video into object-detection training data

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

Training data quantity and quality greatly affect object detection model performance, regardless of model architecture. When using object detection models on video and images from the deep sea, in which the objects of interest, primarily organisms, are sparse, faint, and hard to identify, incremental improvements to object detector performance may require an iterative approach to data labeling and management. This paper presents mbariml, a python-based video and image analysis pipeline built around the data labeling management process. mbariml uses an Ultralytics YOLO detection model, runs it over still images or video, stores every detection as a reviewable region of interest, groups those regions by visual similarity so that a human can accept or reject them in bulk, and exports the result as training data, statistics, image sidecars, and additional metadata. The human review stage is the centre of the design: an annotator can validate, relabel, resize, delete, and draw entirely new localizations, and every one of those edits is written back to the same database the detector wrote to. Video receives particular attention: the software treats each tracker-produced track as a provisional observation and selects one representative frame instead of retaining every detection in the track. We describe the pipeline stage by stage, including the operational middle-third heuristic used for track observation selection.