CoralNet Weights

[Elyssa Winch]

Hello, again!

In line with my last post, I am a graduate student attempting to write a dissertation on coral classification with CNNs. I've got some code set up to classify images using EfficientNet-B0, and one of the papers I'm referencing mentions that the weights for CoralNet's version of this model are publicly available.

I can't find them anywhere, though. Going through this forum, I see that several years ago, the weights were provided at a link that no longer seem to be functional. Are they still available anywhere, or have they since been taken down?

Thank you!

[Stephen Chan]

Hi Elyssa,

Our policy remains that the weights may be used for free by most non-commercial research teams, but we were indeed more trusting and relaxed about distributing the weights in the past. However, we're currently in a landscape where CoralNet funding is a bit more uncertain, and the booming field of machine learning attracts more commercial interests who might not follow the honor system. So we gradually favored providing the weights URL privately to research teams who asked.

The weights download URL never had actual access restrictions and never changed, but I actually completely forgot that the URL was posted publicly some time ago, until I was reminded about that earlier this year. At that point I decided to disable that download URL.

However, we can still provide the weights for non-commercial research purposes like yours. Feel free to email David Kriegman and me with a description of your project, and we'd be happy to give you a temporary link to the weights. This just means that the link will only be available for a certain period of time or a certain number of downloads, to discourage redistribution. But once you have the weights, there's no time limit on how long you can use them, provided that your usage remains non-commercial.

(Note: aside from free distribution to smaller research teams, we've also bundled the weights as part of a larger funded project with WCS, and this has indeed helped to keep us afloat in the past couple of years.)