History

DARWIN is an ongoing software project, which was initially implemented by undergraduate student Mark Allen of Eckerd College under the direction of John Stewman [7], [7]. Significant modifications and progress in performance were subsequently made by Eckerd undergraduates Daniel Wilkin [5], [6] and Zach Roberts [4]. DARWIN's graphical user interface was redesigned to be more intuitive and attractive, and DARWIN's core internals were rewritten and extended for increased modularity and performance in 2000. Work on techniques for unsupervised registration of the outlines of dorsal fins was also performed by Adam Russell [3]. The project originated as and remains a collaborative effort with the Eckerd College Dolphin Research Group established by Dr. John E. Reynolds III, now under the direction of Dr. Shannon Gowans.

Funding Sponsors

> National Science Foundation, Biological Databases and Informatics
> National Science Foundation, Digital Libraries Initiative, Phase 2
> National Marine Fisheries Service
> Eckerd College

Project Members

RJ Nowling (2007 - present): Port to embedded relational database.
Scott Hale (2005 - 2008): Developed multiple approaches to unsupervised extraction of dorsal fin outlines from digital images.
Adam Russell (2000-2002): GTK GUI, software rewrite OOP, perspective distortion correction, current website design.
Kristen McCoy (2000-2001): General software support.
Antonia Vassileva (2001-2002): General software support.
Ramesh Madhusudan (2002): General software support.
Henry Burroughs (2000): Initial website design, general software support.
Zach Roberts (1998-1999): Chain code outline representation.
Daniel J. Wilkin (1995-1998): XWindows GUI, modifications to centroid matching, iterative out of plane matching.
Mark C. Allen (1994-1996): Original software implementation, Windows GUI, active contours, contour signature.
Rachel Stanley (1994): Expert system prototype.
Andrew Cameron (1995): Database prototype.
Kelly Debure (1998-present): Faculty advisor.
John Stewman (1993-1998, and 2004-present): Project founder, faculty advisor.

Publications

[1]J. Stewman and K. Debure and S. Hale and A. Russell, "Iterative 3-D Pose Correction and Content-Based Image Retrieval for Dorsal Fin Recognition," Lecture Notes in Computer Science, International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition (ICIAR), Springer-Verlag, September 2006.

[2]Scott Hale, "Unsupervised Thresholding Morphological Processing for Automatic Fin-outline Extraction in DARWIN (Digital Analysis and Recognition of Whale Images on a Network)," ACM Student Research Competition, 2006.

[3] A. Russell, Feature Detection and Outline Registration in Dorsal Fin Images, Senior Thesis, Eckerd College, 2001.

[4] Z. Roberts, Contour Representation in DARWIN: Digital Analysis to Identify Whale Images on a Network, Senior Thesis, Eckerd College, 2000.

[5] D. Wilkin and K. Debure, "Query by Sketch in DARWIN: Digital Analysis of Whale Images on a Network", Proceedings of the SPIE Conference on Storage and Retrieval for Image and Video Databases VII, San Jose, CA, 1999.

[6] D. Wilkin, DARWIN: Digital Analysis to Identify Whale Images on a Network, Senior Thesis, Eckerd College, 1998.

[7] M. C. Allen, The Development of DARWIN, vol. Senior Thesis, Eckerd College, 1996.

[8] J. Stewman, R. Stanley and M. Allen, "DARWIN: A System to Identify Dolphins from Fin Profiles in Digital Images", Proceedings of the 8th Annual Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Symposium, 1995.