Artificial Intelligence: Fishial.AI
Part of my job at DWR is to review video footage from our fishway camera located in the underground hatch of the Bosher's Dam Fishway. We record from mid-February through June every year in the hopes of spotting an American Shad passing through. There is also a separate constant video stream going during those months for the public to view: Shad Cam If we don't have an intern or part-time technician on staff during the winter months, this mind-numbing duty falls to me. I review a random 15-minute segment from each hour of an entire day and catalog each species I see in that segment as well as the number of them passing through. Don't worry, I can fast-forward the video up to 8x-16x normal speed depending on the amount of fish and the species passing through. And now that I have a lot of practice I have become very adept at identifying species in high numbers and at high speeds. Recently, however, my guardian angel of a regional manager mentioned that AI technology for fish recognition is becoming more and more accurate and accessible.
I did some research into the world of fish identification artificial intelligence but the most promising program for video isn't open source yet. You can find more information about that here: www.ai.fish. Once I get the go ahead from the higher ups (and from my supervisor who is a little mistrustful of AI in terms of fish id) I will contact them and see if we can work something out. While looking at fish identification options I did stumble across another very accurate and user friendly open-source program at portal.fishial.ai. I made an account and dove straight into testing its capabilities. Luckily I have a ton of photos of fish from creek backpack electrofishing sampling that I took to identify species later that I was unsure about at the time and fishial.ai did a great job! I will definitely use this site in the future for any tricky minnow or darter species that I have yet to nail down. The only downside is that they don't have a mobile app available for it yet so I have to upload all the photos using my laptop for now.
Comments
Post a Comment