In 36 years of deep-sea discoveries, MBARI’s remotely operated vehicles have completed more than 7,300 successful dives and recorded approximately 29,000 hours of deep-sea footage. The MBARI Video Lab team is at the heart of this treasure trove of visual data. This video archive includes more than 10 million observations about what we see on video-animals, behaviors, interactions, geological features, marine debris, and more-along with location, depth, and surrounding habitat characteristics.
Video is a powerful tool for studying the ocean. Cameras on MBARI’s advanced underwater robots help our scientists discover remarkable new species, describe communities, and assess ocean health. We’ve amassed a unique archive of deep-sea video that’s essential for research groups across the institute and beyond. The Video Lab’s deep-sea experts comb through thousands of hours of footage with eagle eyes to identify and label animals and objects we film.
Recently MBARI has been piloting exciting new AI technology that will transform ocean exploration. The Video Lab is leveraging this visual data to train machine learning models to identify deep-sea animals with very promising results to date. Eventually, AI will support our team with more efficiently analyzing the ever-increasing stream of video collected by MBARI’s fleet of underwater robots.
MBARI’s video library is a rich repository for education and outreach too. The Video Lab works closely with the Science Communication Team to produce videos and create other content that utilizes these invaluable archives to tell compelling stories about our research.
We’re spotlighting various teams at MBARI to showcase the different ways we’re studying the largest environment on Earth. We hope this series inspires a new generation of ocean explorers. Dive in: mbari.co/MeetMBARI
Learn more about the Video lab on their team page: www.mbari.org/team/video-lab/
Video producer/editor: Dave Timko
Production team: Heidi Cullen, Madeline Go, Larissa Lemon, Kyra Schlining, Nancy Jacobsen Stout, Susan von Thun