UAV Documentation¶
Data¶
Raw data from the UAV is stored in
- smb://atlas.shore.mbari.org/UAV for MacOS users
- cifs://atlas.shore.mbari.org/UAV for Windows users.
Processed data (including cluster grids) are stored in
- smb://atlas.shore.mbari.org/UAV/machineLearning for MacOS users and
- cifs://atlas.shore.mbari.org/UAV/machineLearning for Windows users.
The current data management workflow is as follows:
QBase processing¶
Trinity F90+ QBase3D processing workflow This Google doc describes specific procedures and settings to be used when processing Trinity flight data first with QBase3D then further processed with MBARI’s UAV processing software. Note that QBase3D is a Windows application. The MBARI UAV software is implemented in python 3, so can in principle be executed on various operating systems. However, we have only tested and used the MBARI software on linux operating systems, ubuntu specifically. Therefore, this document assumes the MBARI software is run on ubuntu. This is typically done on the laptop that is used to control the UAV.
Image collection and Level processing¶
The UAV has a mission, data is collected and stored on the UAV, downloaded then processed on shore by the UAV team (Tom O'Reilly) into Level-0, Level-1, and Level-2 data products.
- Level-0 - Raw data from the UAV
- Level-1 - Data products that are derived from the raw data that include time, location, and other metadata
- Level-2 - Data products that are derived from Level-1 data products that are converted to GeoTiFFs, and warped to orthographic projections
Note
The code for processing data is available at https://bitbucket.org/mbari/uavprocessing/

Mission processing¶
After processing data to Level-1, run the process-ai recipe on the machine uavprocessing.
This will load the Level-1 images into the database, detect objects of interest, classify and cluster them, then load the results into the database.
ssh uavshared@uav.shore.mbari.org
cd uavprocessing
just process-ai 20250227-Monterey
In this tool, a user can click on an image and see the image preview, and the metadata associated with that image such as the camera type, location, and time the picture was taken, or browse the localizations that were detected in the image.
Note
A read-only account is available to preview the images and data products in the browser. Username: guest, password: mbariguest.
Images are processed by an AI pipeline to assist with data annotation and exploration. More detail on the AI tools used can be found in the MBARI AI documentation.

updated: 2025-03-12