iFDOs: A Key to Unlocking the Potential of Marine Image Datasets

Poster
In session Postersession No. 1 , Sept. 3, 2025, 15:45 – 16:30
Exact timing: 15:45 – 16:30

Schimpf, Karsten¹ , Krämmer, C.¹

Images and videos are usually a more vivid data source than raw scalar data. However, even in the era of analog photo albums, metadata was added to images to preserve their context for the future. Today, the marine community wants to analyze far larger datasets of videos and images using computers, which generally cannot easily understand the image content on their own. Therefore, researchers have to record the content and context of images in a structured format to enable automated, systematic and quantitative image analysis.

The metadata file format FAIR Digital Objects for images (iFDOs) provides this structure for describing individual images and hole datasets. iFDOs primarily structure the answers to the five W's and H questions: Where were the images taken, by whom, why, when, how, and what is actually shown in the images or videos. Together, these pieces of information provide FAIRness (findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability) to datasets.

Researchers benefit from iFDO enhanced datasets, as they already provide the information necessary for data homogenization, enabling machine learning applications and mass-data-analysis. Data viewers and portals, such as marine-data.de , can increase the reach and impact of datasets by visualizing the datasets and making them findable using the context and content information given by iFDOs. For this to work, the data must first be published in FAIR data repositories such as PANGAEA . However, the data repositories also benefit from iFDOs, as they can use metadata from the iFDO to simplify or even automate parts of the submission process saving time for the curators and researchers.

Although the image datasets and their iFDO files could be created manually, our aim is to automate the process as much as possible, while also integrating existing metadata sources, such as the O2A Registry and the DSHIP land system . The standardized nature of iFDOs enables interoperability between curation and annotation tools, allowing researchers to choose the tools that fit their workflow. To achieve this, we are developing the iFDO Creator , which allows researchers to create and edit iFDOs with a focus on usability. We are also contributing to the marimba framework, which offers a higher degree of automation for dataset and iFDO creation.

We demonstrate that the metadata file standard iFDO benefits researchers at every step of the data lifecycle: measurement, dataset curation and creation, publication and analysis.