APLOSE: A web-based annotation platform for underwater passive acoustic monitoring

Emerging detection and classification algorithms based on deep learning models require manageable large-scale manual annotations of ground truth data. To date, the challenge of creating large and accurate annotated datasets of underwater sounds has been a major obstacle to the development of robust recognition algorithms. APLOSE (Annotation PLatform for Ocean Sound Explorers) is an open-source, web-based tool which facilitates collaborative annotation campaigns in underwater acoustics. The platform was used to carry out research projects on inter-annotator variability, to build training and testing data sets for detection algorithms and to perform bioacoustics analysis on noisy datasets. In the future, it will enable the creation of high-quality reference datasets to test and train the new detection and classification algorithms.