Image Collection - South-East Fishery (SEF) Ecosystem Study 1993-1996: Benthic still image collection (slide rescue)

Brief description

This data represents an image-rescue effort of digitising and documenting analogue slide film imagery under the CSIRO FAIR Imagery Project (OD-227712). This data set contains the imagery collected for the South-East Fishery (Habitat and) Ecosystem Study (SEFHES) on the RV Southern Surveyor voyages SS199305, SS199405, 199602 and 199606. The voyages took place between 1993 and 1996, collecting fisheries data and imagery of the seafloor habitats of the continental shelf off south-eastern Australia.
The slide rescue effort targeted particular sampling operations based on locations coinciding with sampling targets of the 2023-2025 SEA-MES surveys and where continuous film strips of >4 slides were archived.

Instrument(s) used to collect this data:
\tOsprey Camera System (OCS) mounted on an epibenthic sled
\tVideo - TACOS (analog) – photographic slides were taken through the video lens

Datasets include:
Stills (oblique forward view) – scanned slide film.
Navigational data, interpolated between start and end of gear deployment.

Lineage: The imagery was collected using slide-film cameras mounted in two imaging systems: 1. Osprey Camera System (OCS) mounted on an epibenthic sled; and 2. the towed TACOS video system with slide camera operating through the video lens. Slide film rolls were developed on board, labelled by survey and operation, and after finalisation of the SEFHS project retained in archive boxes at CSIRO Hobart.
For the slide rescue effort, the film strips and associated data were located, films were examined for general deterioration prior to having them digitised by an external company (Full Gamut). The digital images were examined and manually coded for sequence within operation and rotation and then processed through a Marimba pipeline for image manipulation (e.g. rotation), file organisation, naming and FAIRising.

The imagery was processed with Marimba V.1.00 (https://github.com/csiro-fair/marimba) using the Image Digitization Pipeline (https://github.com/csiro-fair/image-digitization-pipeline)

File naming convention: CameraPlatform_Camera_Survey_Deployment_YYYYMMDDTHHMMSSZ_image#

GIS location of the camera system was interpolated between start and end location of the deployment and added to the EXIF data of still images. These data, together with a deployment depth range are also provided in .csv format, linked to the image file names.