A participative tool for sharing, annotating and archiving submarine video data

Abstract

The VIDLIB Deep-Sea Video Platform is an open access web-based tool for marine video data storage, streaming, sharing, and analysis. Using VIDLIB specialists can share, access and annotate the same videos from anywhere, thus accelerating the video annotation and analysis process. This way, scientists can share expert knowledge for video analysis (i.e. species identification) without the need to upload and download large video files. Moreover, the tool has the functionalities for participatory science, and science communication in that nonspecialists can ask questions or comment on what they see, and get answers from scientists. VIDLIB is available at http://vidlib.marum.de. In this paper we describe the structure and workflow of the VIDLIB Deep-Sea Video Platform and present an example of analysis from video data in the Southwest Indian Ridge.