wavefront

The official Python client for Finwave datasets.

Finwave serves frozen, versioned wildlife photo-identification and detector datasets behind a small handshake API. wavefront turns that into one call.

pip install finwave-wavefront

Quick start

import wavefront

# the API key is read from $FW_API_TOKEN (or passed as api_key=...)
ds = wavefront.fetch("a7673931-9810-4c52-9654-1c9b1fafb63d", format="yolo")

print(ds.path)          # extracted, ready to train on
print(ds.classes)       # ['fluke']
print(ds.num_images)    # 497
print(ds.fingerprint)   # content hash — record it next to any model you train

ds is path-like, so it drops straight into a trainer:

from ultralytics import YOLO
YOLO("yolo11n.pt").train(data=f"{ds.path}/data.yaml")

Pre-flight without downloading

m = wavefront.manifest("a7673931-9810-4c52-9654-1c9b1fafb63d")
print(m.name, m.sample_count, m.available_formats)   # Flukes v1 497 ['Yolo']

A reusable client

from wavefront import Client
client = Client(api_key="...", base_url="https://finwave.io")
ds = client.fetch(dataset_id, format="yolo", dest="./data/flukes")

Command line

export FW_API_TOKEN=...
wavefront manifest a7673931-9810-4c52-9654-1c9b1fafb63d
wavefront fetch    a7673931-9810-4c52-9654-1c9b1fafb63d --format yolo --dest ./data/flukes

How it works

1. GET /manifest — cheap metadata + which export formats are ready.
2. GET ?format=… — a handshake that mints a short-lived signed download URL.
3. Download that URL → a zip → extract → a Dataset.

Downloads are cached by content fingerprint, so re-fetching a frozen version is a no-op. The key needs the dataset-download scope.

Authentication

Provide the key explicitly (fetch(..., api_key=...)) or set FW_API_TOKEN. For compatibility, WAVEFRONT_API_KEY, FINWAVE_DATASET_API_KEY and DATASET_API_KEY are also accepted (in that order).

Errors

All errors subclass wavefront.WavefrontError:

Exception	When
AuthError	key missing / rejected (401/403)
DatasetNotFoundError	no such version, or not visible to the key (404)
FormatNotAvailableError	the version exists but that export hasn't been generated yet (.available lists what is)
APIError	any other non-success response

License

MIT © Alexander Barnhill / Operational Ecology. A partnership artifact between finwave and Operational Ecology.