OTC-Smart Fishing

Background and Objective

The project will pursue the development of a robust underwater camera system with AI-assisted image recognition for marine organism detection and classification. The solution will initially be prototyped, with the medium-term goal of integrating such a system into commercial fishing trawls. This integration opens up fundamentally new possibilities for fisheries research and fisheries. For example, intelligent AI-based classification can be used to specifically avoid unwanted bycatch, to record the fish stock in terms of size, species and health status for fisheries research, and to deepen the understanding of ecosystems and fishing grounds, through spatially and temporally high-resolution data acquisition directly in the net. The development of a rule base for the general recognition of fish species by AI also creates the possibility for the learning of additional species in other sea areas.

The technical solution described is not currently commercially available. However, there is a clear technological need for several projects and schemes within the Future Cluster. Such a development would clearly demonstrate the capability and also the technological leadership of the cluster in this segment due to its high relevance for scientific and commercial users.