ADA-SHARK

Abstract

Due to global warming, sharks are moving closer to the beaches, affecting the risk to humans and their own lives. Within the past decade, several technologies were developed to reduce the risks for swimmers and surfers. This study proposes a robust method based on computer vision to detect sharks using an underwater camera monitoring system to secure coastlines. The system is autonomous, environment-friendly, and requires low maintenance. 43,679 images extracted from 175 hours of videos of marine life were used to train our algorithms. Our approach allows the collection and analysis of videos in real-time using an autonomous underwater camera connected to a smart buoy charged with solar panels. The videos are processed by a Domain Adversarial Convolutional Neural Network to discern sharks regardless of the background environment with an F2-score of 83.2% and a recall of 90.9%, while human experts have an F2-score of 94% and a recall of 95.7%.