Harmonizing the Deep: A Unified Information Pipeline for Robust Marine Biodiversity Assessment Across Heterogeneous Domains
This provides a more reliable tool for marine ecosystem assessment, particularly for conservation and invasive-species management in Arctic and Atlantic regions, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing detection approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of marine biodiversity monitoring performance degrading when transferred to new underwater sites by developing a Unified Information Pipeline that standardizes heterogeneous datasets, finding that structural factors like scene composition explain cross-domain performance loss more strongly than visual degradation, with sparse scenes causing a 'Context Collapse' failure mode.
Marine biodiversity monitoring requires scalability and reliability across complex underwater environments to support conservation and invasive-species management. Yet existing detection solutions often exhibit a pronounced deployment gap, with performance degrading sharply when transferred to new sites. This work establishes the foundational detection layer for a multi-year invasive species monitoring initiative targeting Arctic and Atlantic marine ecosystems. We address this challenge by developing a Unified Information Pipeline that standardises heterogeneous datasets into a comparable information flow and evaluates a fixed, deployment-relevant detector under controlled cross-domain protocols. Across multiple domains, we find that structural factors, such as scene composition, object density, and contextual redundancy, explain cross-domain performance loss more strongly than visual degradation such as turbidity, with sparse scenes inducing a characteristic "Context Collapse" failure mode. We further validate operational feasibility by benchmarking inference on low-cost edge hardware, showing that runtime optimisation enables practical sampling rates for remote monitoring. The results shift emphasis from image enhancement toward structure-aware reliability, providing a democratised tool for consistent marine ecosystem assessment.