An Automated Visual Event Detection System for Cabled Observatory Video

The permanent presence of underwater cameras on cabled observatories, such as the Victoria Experimental Network Under the Sea (VENUS) and Eye-In-The-Sea (EITS) on Monterey Accelerated Research System (MARS), will generate precious data that can move forward the boundaries of understanding the underwater world. However, sightings of underwater animal activities are rare, resulting in the recording of many hours of video with relatively few events of interest. Towards this end, an automated visual event detection system is in development at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) to address the problem of analyzing cabled observatory video. This paper describes the overall design of the development of a system to process video data and enable science users to analyze the results.