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Digital Camera Could Help Sort Fish, Save Stocks
MountainSplash writes "PlanetArk.com is carrying a story about a new camera that "takes a digital photograph of the catch which is then divided into a grid, allowing a computer to measure the shape and color of each fish in the grid. It needs one tenth of a second and identifies 98 percent of fish correctly." The claim is that fish can then be culled quicker possibly increasing the likelyhood of survival for the incidental catch in the net. Testing is being done by Norway's Institute of Marine Research and Norwegian marine electronics maker Scantrol. Onboard testing has proven highly successful, but underwater attempts still need more work. With everything we have all been seeing computers do the last few years, I personally found this to be one of the more interesting of late."
The story fails to mention when and how the picture is taken. I believe for this to be effective, no two fishes must be too close nor on top of each other. Anyone has more technical details on the process?
DrkBr
Aside from the pun, the camera can be linked to a sorting device - so that it can .... what? NOT dump the fish? Also, this reduces the waste to ... 25% - down from 33% - not a gigantic saving. Every little bit helps.
All in all, short on detail, and how it will reduce waste, lets see them sort the fish and reject the unwanted ones BEFORE the die from exhaustion on board
Johns: Well, how does it look now? Riddick: Looks clear.
Well if I am reading this article correctly they will only save around 7.3% so it isnt that much of a gain, more that that would most likely be saved by better fishing practices.
Is the real problem that we're killing too many of the fishes we didn't intend to catch? Or is it that we're catching too many fish?
Gee, I wonder what kind of pattern matching/classification algorithm it is using. 98% is pretty damn high. Really high. That is a very robust algorithm indeed.
If it can be applied to fish, it can be applied to nearly any kind of object that needs to be identified. I would really like more technical details, as I am very sceptical of this 98% business.
Searching for 'automatic "fish classification"' doesn't turn up much...
I'm guessing it's a neural network or some other sort of classifier that has been trained with existing pictures of fish.
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Hmmm...I'd read this as being more useful for scientific studies of fish stocks, rather than for the fishing industry. I mean, I'm sure both would find it useful, but the cost and reliability issues would rule it out for the majority of fishermen, as a few other posters have already said.
Good technology for scientists, especially if they are keen on returning live fish to the sea as far as is possible. Fish stock estimation is pretty unreliable as is, at least in the UK. Maybe something like this would help.
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When I was in the Navy, my ship went into the shipyard for an overhaul - among the equipment scheduled for repair was one of the ship's massive clothes dryers. When the tumbler was removed from its spindle, repair workers found... you guessed it... an enormous bundle of yarn wrapped around the spindle - the remains of uncounted socks the dryer had "eaten" over the years.
No kidding.
Sean
The problems come from the large factory trawlers. Because of the way the fish asphyxiate in the trawler nets, there is no advantage to sorting them. In fact, some larger vessels grind the dead fish to chum to avoid having incriminating dead fish floating on the surface. In contrast, smaller operations (say a 2 man boat at the smallest), line fish and pull in many km of hooked line. This means that as they pull the fish in by hand, if it is the wrong sort or size, they let it drop. If it is the right size and sort, they gaff it and pull it in. Salt water fish are quite tough and likely to survive the former. One flatfish made the local papers and earned a retirement in the local aquarium by virtue of surviving about 12 hours out of water.
If the trawling process is allowed to continue and if it is modified so that the fish are brought on board live, then the digital camera sorting would be very useful.
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The simple summary of recent fisheries history is that we are destroying stock after stock, around the world. For more on this, I recommend a Nature paper by my colleague Ransom Myers, entitled "Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities" [Nature 2003, vol 423: p280-283]. The paper is somewhat technical, but even if your Statistics are a bit rusty, check out Figure 2, which shows a world map of depletion. To give you a gist (and a chill up your spine), here's a quote from the paper: "Industrialized fisheries typically reduced community biomass by 80% within 15 years of exploitation."
If you don't have an online subscription to Nature.com, you can find the paper and related papers at Myers' website http://fish.dal.ca/~myers