WHOI-Plankton- A Large Scale Fine Grained Visual Recognition Benchmark Dataset for Plankton Classification

Understand

Planktonic organisms are of fundamental importance to marine ecosystems: they form the basis of the food web, provide the link between the atmosphere and the deep ocean, and influence global-scale biogeochemical cycles.

• Scientists are increasingly using imaging-based technologies to study these creatures in their natural habit.
• Images from such systems provide an unique opportunity to model and understand plankton ecosystems, but the collected datasets can be enormous.
• The Imaging FlowCytobot (IFCB) at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, for example, is an \emph{in situ} system that has been continuously imaging plankton since 2006.