N-MARINE is a marine-taxa detection and classification dataset collected in 2021 using underwater video cameras mounted on crab pots equipped with lights and bait, deployed at depths of 400–500 m within a small portion of the Northeast Newfoundland Slope Closure. Further details on survey design and acquisition procedures are provided in [1]. The dataset contains 23,936 high-resolution images (1920 × 1080 px; ~1 MB per image; ~30 GB total), each annotated with bounding boxes and species labels. Nine marine species are documented, and images may contain multiple individuals per frame.
N-MARINE is a curated subset of 185 videos drawn from a larger corpus of 221 videos originally collected to study the impacts of seismic activity. Each video is approximately five minutes long, recorded at 30 fps. From each video, 1,500 frames were annotated, but only a subset of these annotated frames is included in the open-source release, resulting in a total of 23,936 images in the dataset. A single Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) ecologist annotated all images in DIVE [2], labeling all visible organisms, including partially occluded and truncated individuals.
Images are organized by source video, and filenames/metadata encode both the video identifier and frame index, enabling users to determine whether images originate from the same or different videos. For each species, up to 3,000 positive images were randomly sampled, with all available images included when fewer than 3,000 examples existed. Additionally, 3,000 negative (background) images were randomly sampled from across the 185 videos. Annotations are provided only in YOLO-style per-video CSV files, which include both absolute pixel coordinates and normalized coordinates for each bounding box.
Morris, C. J., Ayyagari, K. D., Porter, D., Nguyen, Q. K., Hanlon, J., & Whidden, C. (2025). Newfoundland Marine Refuge Fish Classification Dataset (N-Marine). Government of Canada Open Data Portal. https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/2ae46860-f82a-4127-bb1f-b02e36ef6a70
Funding was provided by Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the Environmental Studies Research Fund.
References
[1] Corey Morris, Joshua Barnes, Dustin Schornagel, Christopher Whidden, and Phillippe Lamontagne. Measuring effects of seismic surveying on groundfish resources off the coast of newfoundland, canada. Journal of Ocean Technology, 16(3):57–63.
[2] VIAME Contributors. VIAME: Video and Image Analytics for Marine Environments, 5 2017.