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Home > J-Litter: An Image Dataset for Deep-Sea Plastic and Macrolitter Detection

J-Litter: An Image Dataset for Deep-Sea Plastic and Macrolitter Detection

Abstract

This is a dataset designed for training AI to detect plastic and macrolitter in images captured during deep-sea observations. The target categories are "plastic-film," "plastic-bottle," "beverage-can," "other-metal," and "others." The dataset consists of approximately 10,000 image files. These images were extracted from deep-sea videos available on JAMSTEC's "Deep-sea Debris Database" and "Deep-sea Video & Image Archives (J-EDI)," as well as from footage taken during deep-sea surveys by the "Shinkai 6500" and "Hyper-Dolphin" between 2022 and 2025. The dataset includes a JSON file containing bounding boxes and label information created in the COCO (Common Objects in Context) format, a widely used training data format in the image AI field. The entire dataset is available for download as a zip file.

Dataset examples

The dataset was created by using following software:

Abhishek Dutta and Andrew Zisserman. 2019. The VIA Annotation Software for Images, Audio and Video. In Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM ’19), October 21–25, 2019, Nice, France. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3343031.3350535.

Data Policy

The copyright of the dataset belongs to JAMSTEC. Please refer to JAMSTEC’s data policy (https://www.jamstec.go.jp/e/database/data_policy.html) for details.

Conditions of Use

  • The dataset is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en).
  • The dataset can be used for scientific or educational purposes only.
  • If you use the dataset, please cite it as follows:

    Takaki Nishio, Ryota Nakajima (2025). J-Litter. JAMSTEC. https://doi.org/10.17596/0004172 (accessed YYYY-MM-DD)

Download

J-Litter.zip (988MB)

Acknowledgments

  • Some of the source videos used to extract the images for this dataset were filmed during research cruises funded by the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (JPMEERF23S21002) of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency (ERCA), provided by the Ministry of the Environment.
  • Some of the source videos used to extract the images for this dataset were filmed during research cruises funded by the Moonshot Research & Development Program “Research and development of marine biodegradable plastics with degradation initiation switch function” (JPNP18016) commissioned by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).

Contact

If you have any questions related to the dataset, please contact to:

dsdebris-adminjamstec.go.jp