The SharkByte Portal

🦈 How to install and use SharkByte

Welcome to the Shark Detector page, and to SharkByte — your all-in-one toolkit for automated shark detection and species classification!

SharkByte was created to package the power of SharkTrack and the Shark Detector models into a single, streamlined application. Designed with both practical field work and user-friendly programmatic interaction in mind, SharkByte brings automated shark detection and species identification right to your fingertips.

Whether you’re a marine researcher, a conservation practitioner, or an enthusiastic citizen scientist, SharkByte equips you with an intuitive graphical interface and customizable processing options. All that’s left is for you to go find the sharks!

📥 Downloading and Installing SharkByte

  • Visit our GitHub page
  • Download the latest version for your operating system (Windows or Mac): download SharkByte
  • Visit the SharkTrack page to learn about YOLO-based object-detection of elasmobranchs SharkTrack

🌊 Why use SharkByte?

SharkByte was primarily developed for two powerful use-cases:

  1. Processing underwater video material:
    SharkByte scans videos to detect sharks, filter out irrelevant content (like empty frames or non-shark animals), and classify each detected shark down to the species level. This dramatically reduces the hours spent manually combing through footage, especially for long-term deployments or baited remote underwater videos (BRUVs).

  2. Contributing to shark AI research:
    We rely on community-driven science to continuously improve our Shark Detector models.
    As a citizen scientist or collaborating researcher, you can help by:

    • Sourcing videos from around the world (dives, fishing operations, public archives, or even personal GoPro footage).
    • Processing them with SharkByte to generate labeled datasets (frames, crops, and annotation files).
    • Uploading your results to the SharkPulse server.

Once uploaded, your data is validated by a team of shark experts, integrated into our retraining workflows, and directly boosts the performance and taxonomic accuracy of the models — globally and across diverse habitats.

🚀 How to run SharkByte

  1. Launch SharkByte

    • On Windows, double click SharkByte.exe.
    • On Mac, open SharkByte.dmg and install to your Applications.

  2. Select your video files

    • Click the Select Video button to locate your videos on your computer.

  3. Customize settings

    • Choose Detection Threshold (0.5 default = model must be 50% sure the object is a shark!)
    • Choose processing speed with FPS Rate (5 default = 5 frames per second)
    • Select output folder
    • Option to download cropped shark subjects (just the cropped image, and not the whole frame)
    • Option to download the whole frame with a drawn bounding-box around the shark subject
    • Option to use a local Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)
    • Option to classify the species

  4. Add Metadata If you want to spice up your annotations file, you can add information that you already know! For example, if the video contains only one species of shark, tell SharkByte in the Add Metadata section. If you decide to submit your detections to sharkPulse, this information will help the Shark Detector grow even smarter at classifying species!

    • You can select a Species Name from a list of all 544 species of sharks
    • Input the Location where the video was recorded
    • Input the precise Latitude and Longitude coordinates
    • Input the Source of the video such as YouTube or Global FinPrint
    • Provide any additional notes about the video (e.g. time of day, observed in a market or on a dive)

  5. Start processing

    • Click Run Detection. SharkByte will:
      • Detect all shark occurrences in your videos.
      • Save the corresponding frames and cropped shark images (depending on your options).
      • Generate a detailed annotations.csv describing each detection (including frame name, species classification, coordinates, and confidence scores).

  6. Review your output

    • Your results will be stored in a folder like: 
      myvideo/
├── frames/
├── crops/
└── myvideo_annotations.csv

To increase the Shark Detector’s classification performance, we invite SharkByte users to submit their shark detections!

📤 Uploading your data to SharkPulse

  1. Register Username and Password To limit traffic on our server, we encourage dedicated users to sign up with an email, username, and password (Register tab). Please remember these credentials when submitting shark detections to SharkPulse. You will need them!

  2. Prepare your dataset

    • Once processing is complete, SharkByte will organize your output into a folder.
    • You can zip this folder directly from within SharkByte or manually:
      • Right-click the folder and select “Compress” (on Mac) or “Send to → Compressed (zipped) folder” (on Windows).
      • OR press Zip Output Folder once processing is complete.

  3. Upload from SharkByte

    • Go to the Upload Zip to Server button in SharkByte.
    • Enter your username and password so we can verify your username and track contributions. We always keen to hand out prizes to our most determined SharkPulse users!
    • Select the zip file you just created, and SharkByte will do the rest.

  4. What happens next?

    • Our team of experts reviews and validates the new records.
    • Once confirmed, your dataset enters the retraining pipeline, helping improve shark detection and species classification models worldwide.
    • You’ll receive an email notification when validation is complete.

🙋 Questions or need help?

If you encounter any issues, please reach out to us at
support@sharkpulse.org.
We’re happy to assist and look forward to having you join our global effort to monitor and conserve sharks!

Register for SharkPulse Uploads

This registration creates a username and password recognized by the SharkPulse server.

You will use these credentials when submitting your SharkByte detections.