September 16, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:
The Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center is launching a new citizen science project called OceanEYEs. We are seeking volunteers to help find Deep 7 bottomfish in underwater videos.
A student in the Young Scientist Opportunity program and our scientists have partnered with Zooniverse.org to develop a user-friendly web page called OceanEYEs. There, citizen scientists can help review images from our annual bottomfish survey, tagging and identifying all the fish that they see. Scientists can then use those data to train advanced artificial intelligence (AI) tools, to look at different ways of counting fish in video. The data can also be used as information for stock assessments.
The images are collected every year during the Bottomfish Fishery-Independent Survey in Hawaii (#BFISH) using state of the art stereo-camera systems. The survey provides an estimate of the number of “Deep 7” bottomfish. That’s a group of seven species of fish that have both economic and cultural value to the islands. The data from this survey are used in the Deep 7 stock assessment to provide managers with the best information to make management decisions. That includes annual commercial fishery catch limits.
The camera systems, which rest on the seafloor for 15 minutes at a time, record hundreds of thousands of images over the course of the survey. NOAA scientists currently analyze these images but, as you can imagine, the number of images collected during survey operations can quickly overwhelm them.
NOAA has been investing heavily in the development of AI solutions, allowing scientists to use machine learning and computer vision to analyze images. However, for the machine to learn, it requires large numbers of training images. Those are images of fish that a human has already tagged and identified.