The 4th Workshop on Computer Vision for Analysis of Underwater Imagery (CVAUI) 2020 will be held in Milan, Italy, on 10 January 2021 in conjunction with the International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) 2020.
Monitoring marine ecosystems is of critical importance for gaining a better understanding of their complexity, including the effects of climate change and other anthropogenic influences on the ocean environment.
Recently, oceanographic data acquisition has been greatly facilitated by the establishment of seafloor cabled observatories whose co-located sensors support interdisciplinary studies and real-time observations. Traditional oceanographic research involved mostly ship-based sampling and autonomous deployments. These methods offer only a limited temporal sampling of complex underwater phenomena. Prior to the advent of cabled observatories, the majority of deep-sea video data was acquired by ROVs (remotely operated vehicles), and was analyzed and annotated manually. In contrast, seafloor cabled observatories such those operated by Ocean Networks Canada offer a 24/7 presence, resulting in unprecedented volumes of visual data. Scheduled recordings of underwater video data and static images are gathered with Internet-connected fixed and PTZ cameras, which observe a variety of biological processes. Automated analysis of underwater imagery, for both fixed and mobile camera systems, is an emerging and rapidly growing field.
The analysis of underwater imagery imposes a series of unique challenges, which need to be tackled by the computer vision community in collaboration with biologists and ocean scientists. We invite submissions from all areas of computer vision and image analysis relevant for, or applied to, underwater image analysis. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- underwater image enhancement
- physical models of reflectance and light transport
- underwater scene understanding
- classification, detection, segmentation
- autonomous underwater navigation
- detection and monitoring of marine life
- automated analysis for fisheries research
- object tracking
- automatic video annotation and summarization
- context-aware machine learning and image understanding
CVAUI 2020 will be the first flagship event of the IAPR TC 5 Technical Committee, Computer Vision for Underwater Environmental Monitoring. The three previous, successful and well-attended CVAUI workshops were held as satellite workshops of ICPR before the formation of the TC.
The proceedings of the previous workshops are available via IEEE Xplore for 2014 and 2016, and Springer for 2018. Proceedings of CVAUI 2020 will be published by Springer.