Abstract
Marine imagery can be a comparatively cost-effective way to collect data on seafloor organisms, biodiversity and habitat morphology. However, annotating these images to extract detailed biological information is time-consuming and expensive, and reference libraries of consistently annotated seafloor images are rarely publicly available. Here, we present the Antarctic Seafloor Annotated Imagery Database (AS-AID), a result of a multinational collaboration to collate and annotate seafloor imagery datasets from 21 Antarctic research campaigns between 1985 and 2019. AS-AID is comprised of 52,491 georeferenced downward facing seafloor images of which 3,599 have been labelled with a total of 632,252 expert annotations. Annotations are based on the Collaborative and Automated Tools for Analysis of Marine Imagery (CATAMI) classification scheme and have been reviewed by experts. In addition, because the pixel location of each annotation within each image is available, annotations can be viewed easily and customised to suit individual research priorities. This dataset can be used to investigate species distributions, community patterns, provide a reference to assess change through time, and can be used to train algorithms to automatically detect and annotate marine fauna.