Sharkbook.ai: add basking shark support

Feature Requests
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1

Jason, sorry to jump in - would love to upload Mediterranean basking sharks fins. There’s only half a dozen or so, but it would be fantastic if they match up with any Atlantic ones!

2

Hi @edesabata

I have enabled data submission and dorsal fin matching for basking sharks under ticket WB-1896.

Detection of the dorsal fin should be done automatically by machine learning, and the resulting bounding box should be passed on to the CurvRank v2 and finFindR algorithms:

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A few disclaimers:

  • We’re cross-apply a fin detector trained on multiple species of whales and dolphins to basking sharks here. It should work generally well, but in the future, if we can get 1000+ photos of basking shark dorsal fins, we may be able to detector them with tighter bounding boxes.

  • Similarly, the CurvRank v2 and finFindR algorithms were trained on non-shark species. I have seen them do a good job matching white shark fins, but it is an open experiment as to whether they will match basking shark dorsals well in their current trainings on other species. These too could be better trained specifically for basking sharks if we had more photos and individual IDs. We even have a newer system called PIE that may even be more high performing.

And a few questions:

  • We don’t have any other users’ basking shark data for you to match against. Can you suggest some collaborators who might want to load their data into sharkbook.ai?

  • Sharkbook.ai can filter matching by study sites and regional areas, allowing you to make more specific potential match lists. Do you have a list of known basking sharks study sites (yours or others’) that we should add to Sharkbook?

Thanks,
Jason

3

@edesabata

using the basking shark matching now in Sharkbook.ai will follow these instructions:

https://docs.wildme.org/docs/researchers/firstlogin#submit-and-match-your-first-encounters

Thanks,
Jason

4

thanks Jason. Will talk to colleagues in the UK to see if they are interested in matching their fins here

1 Like
5

Hi @edesabata

Have you had a chance to try the basking shark fin matching? This is a cross-application of machine learning built for fin matching. I am curious how well it will or will not work.

Thanks,
Jason