BIIGLE2Go—A scalable image annotation system for easy deployment on cruises

Digital imaging is gaining more and more attention in marine environmental monitoring and exploration. Nowadays, mobile platforms such as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are equipped with high-resolution cameras that can collect gigabytes of digital images in a single dive. To extract quantitative and qualitative information from the accumulating image collections, annotation tools such as BIIGLE 2.0 have been proposed recently and have been established in the data analysis workflow. These tools run as web applications on a central server and can be accessed worldwide via the Internet. However, marine science and engineering are naturally associated with a high degree of mobility and, in some cases, limited resources or Internet access. Here we present a new application architecture for BIIGLE 2.0, which is particularly suitable for offshore deployment on a variety of platforms such as a server, workstation, laptop or even a small single-board computer such as a Raspberry Pi. We refer to the application architecture in combination with a mobile hardware platform as "BIIGLE2Go", which addresses the need for more flexibility and mobility in image annotation. We present and evaluate a first prototype for BIIGLE2Go, which runs as a mobile annotation system on a low-cost Raspberry Pi 3B.