Drones for IUU (illegal fishing activities & vessel monitoring)

Adam Roberts

@adam87

Conservation Biologist working in marine conservation in Cambodia who recognizes tech as the new age of conservation, monitoring, surveillance and prevention of wildlife crime.

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Hi, new to Wildlabs and happy to have found it

I am currently working on drone design (fixed wing), for the purpose of monitoring illegal fishing vessels. This will be done via camera sensors, and potentially an IR sensor for night missions.

We are designing the drone and application from the ground up, and I wanted to ask if anyone out there has used drones for ID of particular subject, or series of subjects, say, animal populations etc? And if so, I would love to hear about the post-recording data workflow.

With 3 cameras on our drone I will be collecting a great deal of vessel data, and am currently trying to design protocols for a workflow to bring that data into something useful (gis, written reports,etc). If anyone has had any experience of this I would love to hear from you

Cheers!

Frank van der Most

@Frank_van_der_Most

FileMaker developer with a passion for nature.

30 March 2023 6:12pm

Sounds like an awesome project! Tracking vessels is notoriously difficult because they can switch off their transponders. ( but check out https://www.skylight.global/ where they try to calculate/guesstimate those vessels anyways ) and if you are tracking small boats near the coast then they may not even have a transponder. Also, since AI can identify species and even individuals, there should be little problems with recognizing vessels.

I can not answer your question specifically, but it seems that your workflow problem is similar to that of working with camera traps, and there seems to be plenty of software for that. ... on second thoughts, you probably thought of that but did not find what you are looking for?

Adam Roberts

30 March 2023 6:12pm

Hi Frank! Thanks so much for your reply. Yes I have been looking into the same sort of workflow as with camera traps etc and seem to be getting somewhere (although am yet to have my own data set with which to check!).

Yes, with the transponder issue, actually NONE of the boats here have them! There has been a push to get boats to install them further down the coast, but it was marred by the usual corruption and forceless enforcement. So everything will be visual, rather than working on any signal given out by the boats themselves. I am looking into ai programs that can analyse footage and as you say, it can be done with species so I see no reason it cannot be done with vessels given the parameters to look for

Frank van der Most

30 March 2023 6:12pm

Seeing the pictures that @lmccaskill uploaded got my brain storming, so to say. Are you working with similar small boats? I was assuming bigger fishing ships that are registered somewhere. If the boats are not registered and there are no existing photos of them, and you want to identify the individual boats, you'll need to build your own catalogue to train an AI.

However / in addition, if the boats have written text on them with a name or a code or number, like in the pictures, then it should be ridiculously easy to identify boats. No AI needed. I discovered recently that my laptop has started showing find results based on text in photos. If different boats are of the same model, again like in the pictures, then there is nothing else left than what is written on them ... well, perhaps the color scheme.

... or perhaps face recognition if the image quality allows it. But then you'll be at square 1 again with training an AI.

Lonnie McCaskill

@lmccaskill

Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)

Assistant Director/Curator of Prospect Park Zoo of the Wildlife Conservation Society

1 April 2023 10:23pm

We gave a drone to a marine reserve in Myumba National Park inGabon with great results!