How MERMAID Uses Your Photos for Image Classification

When you upload photos for image classification in MERMAID Collect, you’re helping build a global resource for coral reef science. These photos power new AI and machine learning tools that help identify benthic attributes automatically from coral reef images. To support this innovation, MERMAID treats your photos differently from your other data.

Here's What You Need to Know:

1. Your photos are anonymized and stored in a public bucket
   All uploaded photos are stored in a public bucket on Amazon Web Services (AWS). MERMAID automatically strips these photos of all EXIF metadata, including personal and location data such as the date, time, and GPS coordinates, ensuring they are anonymized.

2. Your data sharing policy applies only to your project data, not your photos
   Even if your project is set to “Private” or “Public summary”, photos may still be used publicly for training and improving MERMAID’s AI image classification models. While photos are publicly accessible via the AWS bucket, your classification results and other project data remain protected by the data sharing policy you've selected for your project(s). These outputs are not publicly accessible and cannot be linked back to your project through the photos. Users cannot access your classification results or any other project data unless explicitly shared through your project’s data sharing policy (i.e., Public summary or Public).

3. Your photos may be used for AI and other public tools
   Once stripped of metadata and being anonymized, your photos may be shared publicly and used by MERMAID and others for:

   • Training machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) models

   • Creating labeled or annotated datasets

   • Improving coral reef monitoring tools

This helps MERMAID provide faster, smarter tools for all users of the platform.

4. No one can see where your photos were taken—unless they’re in your team
   Other users (including the public) won’t see which project, site, or transect your photos came from. Only authenticated users within your project team can access this additional information, through the MERMAID API or internal project access e.g., using MERMAID Collect. 

5. You retain control of your project and data
   While your photos may be used in broader ways to enhance AI models, your observations, site-level summaries, and other project data remain protected according to the data sharing policy you’ve selected. This ensures that only anonymized photos are used to improve machine learning models for coral reef monitoring.

See more on the MERMAID Terms of Service.