Beluga Whale Detection from Satellite Imagery with Point Labels

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated, point-label-based detection pipeline for beluga whales and seals in satellite imagery, improving accuracy and reducing manual annotation effort using SAM and YOLOv8.

Contribution

It introduces a novel detection pipeline that leverages point annotations and SAM to generate bounding boxes, enhancing detection of uncertain whales and streamlining the annotation process.

Findings

SAM-generated annotations outperform traditional buffer-based methods

YOLOv8 achieves 72.2% F1-score for whales

Method improves detection in dense scenes

Abstract

Very high-resolution (VHR) satellite imagery has emerged as a powerful tool for monitoring marine animals on a large scale. However, existing deep learning-based whale detection methods usually require manually created, high-quality bounding box annotations, which are labor-intensive to produce. Moreover, existing studies often exclude ``uncertain whales'', individuals that have ambiguous appearances in satellite imagery, limiting the applicability of these models in real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, this study introduces an automated pipeline for detecting beluga whales and harp seals in VHR satellite imagery. The pipeline leverages point annotations and the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to generate precise bounding box annotations, which are used to train YOLOv8 for multiclass detection of certain whales, uncertain whales, and harp seals. Experimental results demonstrated that SAM-generated annotations significantly improved detection performance, achieving higher $\text{F}_\text{1}$-scores compared to traditional buffer-based annotations. YOLOv8 trained on SAM-labeled boxes achieved an overall $\text{F}_\text{1}$-score of 72.2% for whales overall and 70.3% for harp seals, with superior performance in dense scenes. The proposed approach not only reduces the manual effort required for annotation but also enhances the detection of uncertain whales, offering a more comprehensive solution for marine animal monitoring. This method holds great potential for extending to other species, habitats, and remote sensing platforms, as well as for estimating whale biometrics, thereby advancing ecological monitoring and conservation efforts. The codes for our label and detection pipeline are publicly available at http://github.com/voyagerxvoyagerx/beluga-seeker .