EM4FISH
SEP 1, 2022
By Abigail Turner-Franke, Dan Falvey, and Eric Torgerson
Maintaining high quality EM video while fishing is an important factor for keeping EM video review costs affordable and providing fishery managers with accurate data. High quality EM video is also fundamental to the development of machine learning capabilities that will further reduce review costs over the long term. That said, there is a lot going on when a vessel is actively fishing, with vessel/crew safety and efficiency of operations being the primary focus of the skipper and crew. To maintain high quality EM video in the complex, dynamic environment of a commercial fishing vessel, near real-time feedback to the vessel operator when EM video quality becomes degraded is crucial. The overall goal of this project was to find a way to improve image quality. We know that by developing a tool that can identify an image quality issue and alert a skipper, we can work toward producing more useable video data per trip for reviewers first, then fisheries managers.
Since 2010, the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association (ALFA) and the North Pacific Fisheries Association (NPFA) have been working with demersal longline and pot fixed gear vessels to develop practical EM solutions for fisheries monitoring in Alaska. The Alaska region fixed gear EM pool currently has approximately 170 vessels participating in a voluntary program where EM video is used to directly estimate discards for catch accounting purposes. In early 2020, fresh out of the National Electronic Monitoring Workshop in Seattle, where machine learning was a hot topic, ALFA’s Dan Falvey and NPFA’s Abigail Turner-Franke developed a pilot project to work with Chordata LLC’s Eric Torgerson to develop computer vision tools for the detection of EM video quality issues such as water drops, condensation and dirty lenses in real-time, onboard the vessel. Thanks to funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, this pilot project was launched and is showing promising results.
Projects in the Field is a series of independently produced articles profiling work supported by NFWF’s Electronic Monitoring & Reporting Grant Program, and is meant to raise awareness and support for these important initiatives. To submit an article for this series, please contact us at info@em4.fish.