The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation recently awarded $300,000 to artificial intelligence company Ai.Fish.
The company will use the grant to explore the usage of its AI algorithms on incoming video streams of fishing activity on-board boats, rather than via a hard drive that has to be taken into an office for analysis, eliminating the need for large data transfers and enabling nearly real-time reporting, according to Ai.Fish Co-founder and CEO Jimmy Freese.
"It's really a continuation of the work that we've been doing, which focuses on automated catch accounting and video analysis," Freese told Pacific Business News.
Ai.Fish conducts video analysis using artificial intelligence and computer vision to analyze fishing activity on boats, as previously reported by PBN. It also does a variety of work within the marine industry, including counting seals with camera traps, helping to identify coral, and counting boats.
"The difference here is that sort of analysis and automation is done on the vessel instead of being transferred onto the cloud," he said. "This wouldn't have been an option three years ago or five years ago, but now there's a bunch of smaller computers that are kind of low power that can go on places like boats. They have fast enough chips to determine when it's looking down at the deck of the vessel that, okay, 'that's a human, that's a fish, that's an ahi, that's an ono, that's a turtle.'"
In September, Ai.Fish received a $150,000 grant from NOAA through the Small Business Innovation Research program for a six-month project to create a multimodal computer vision system for fisheries monitoring. The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation has also previously granted $306,000 and $250,000 to Ai.Fish for separate year-long projects, Freese told PBN at the time.
Freese added that the company is also currently hiring. Ai.Fish is looking for interns, as well as a machine learning engineer with experience in computer vision.
