NOAA recently awarded $150,000 to artificial intelligence company Ai.Fish through the Small Business Innovation Research program.
The grant will help fund a six-month long project to create a multimodal computer vision system for fisheries monitoring and will further the company’s research on species identification and object tracking, according to Ai.Fish CEO Jimmy Freese.
“If you have five guys moving around in a boat that's rocking, and they bring fish on, and they get in the way of the [camera’s] view of that fish — simpler artificial intelligence will recount the fish that disappeared and reappeared without knowing it’s the same fish,” Freese told PBN. “So you have to build in a lot of scene recognition and object tracking to understand where the object might be in a chaotic environment.”
Ai.Fish conducts video analysis using artificial intelligence and computer vision to analyze fishing activity on boats, according to Freese.
“It saves a lot of time and manual labor from having to watch long videos where fish aren’t actually getting caught,” he said.
“They have cameras which are pointed at the deck, or at the door near where the fish come in, and we take that footage and we can say ‘that’s a yellowfin tuna, and that’s your 14th one’ and we have a confidence of 92% that that’s a yellowfin.”
The company does a variety of work within the marine industry including counting seals with camera traps, helping identify coral, and counting boats, Freese said, adding that there’s very little data on small-reef fishing.
The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, which works with NOAA, has previously granted $306,000 and $250,000 to Ai.Fish for separate year-long projects, according to Freese.
Future projects for Ai.Fish include the launch of a software product that will allow fishermen to upload large amounts of fishing data into the company’s website and Ai.Fish will analyze it – custom tailored to what the customer wants, according to Freese.
“We have people coming to us with a petabyte of data, which is a thousand terabytes, and they don’t really know what to do with it,” Freese said.
Ai.Fish is planning for a beta release of that project in Dec. 2022.
