Camouflaged Rays Detection With Above Water Cameras in Oceanário de Lisboa

May 20, 2025

Studying an animal's behaviour patterns can help biologists preserve its species. By monitoring the behaviour of the animal, biologists can develop strategies to encourage healthy habits and prevent harmful ones. However, this study becomes increasingly difficult when dealing with camouflaged animals and environmental factors that further prevent their detection. In aquatic environments, glare is caused by light reflection on the water surface and contributes to the difficulty of this task. To tackle this challenge, we teamed up with Oceanário de Lisboa to develop a system capable of detecting camouflaged rays under formidable circumstances. We captured above-water footage of their habitat and created a large dataset to train and test a state-of-the-art camouflaged object detector. In this thesis, we compare the performance of different camouflaged object detectors on our dataset and detail our strategy to monitor camouflaged thornback rays whilst dealing with glare caused by the water surface.

Authors in the community:

• 

  T

  Tomás da Silva Faria Lampreia Gomes

  ist190782

Supervisors of this institution:

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  H

  Helena Sofia Andrade Nunes Pereira Pinto

  ist12906

• 

  A

  Alexandre José Malheiro Bernardino

  ist13761

electrical-engineering-electronic-engineering-information-engineering - Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering

eng - English

Instituto Superior Técnico