Humans (and our stomachs) love fish. However, the populations of many popular species, like tuna, are vulnerable to unsustainable fishing practices as fishermen work to meet consumer demand. Because of this, government agencies and third-party organizations employ fishery observers who monitor what’s caught and what’s discarded by U.S. commercial fishing vessels.
Electronic monitoring (camera and sensor systems onboard commercial fishing vessels) can be more accurate than traditional fishery observers. However, electronic monitoring, or EM, creates a vast amount of video to be reviewed. According to a report by the Australian government, “a single fishing trip can generate over 2TB of video data” making EM video review expensive in both time and financial cost.
But an American small business is leveraging artificial intelligence to provide a solution to the video review problem.
The NOAA Small Business Innovation Research program (SBIR) funded a company called Ai.Fish that specializes in bringing AI solutions to the Blue Economy. As a result of the SBIR funding, Ai.Fish created an AI/ML software called Catchvision that reviews the EM videos and flags important items for later human review, saving commercial fisheries time, money, and manpower.
Catchvision does not replace human oversight of commercial fishing. Instead, it facilitates “AI-assisted review” that saves up to 80% of the time spent reviewing EM footage. As part of the AI-assisted review, the Catchvision system both counts the number of fish caught and identifies the species, making it easier for both fishery management staff and regulators to ensure that rules and regulations are being followed. The system then produces a downloadable report of review results, facilitating record keeping and official reporting.
Catchvision and Ai.Fish are an example of how the NOAA SBIR program can help small businesses take a cutting-edge technology (AI) and use it to save time, money, and resources for American industry. By simultaneously cutting down on the time spent on monitoring and improving monitoring accuracy, Catchvision helps the fishing industry streamline the reporting process and makes it easier for fishery management bodies and regulators to make sure that fishing vessels are following the rules.
Ai.Fish gives a great deal of credit to the opportunity offered by the NOAA SBIR program. Co-founder and CEO Jimmy Freese says, “The NOAA SBIR program gave us both the financial runway and the structured framework we needed to achieve full commercial readiness. Without that support, our path to market would have been significantly longer and more uncertain.”