Page 17: of Marine Technology Magazine (November 2020)

The Search for Abandoned Crab Pots

The University of Delaware has to support guided detection and recov- participated in a state program which ery of ghost pots.

supports rescuing abandoned crab Arthur Trembanis, Professor of pots from the seabed, and researches Oceanography at University of Dela- technologies to make the search pro- ware School of Marine Science and cess more effective. It has advanced Policy, explained that with the threats sonar surveys from a boat with further ghost pots present to the environment, map storage and processing in SPH it is critical to detect crab pots ef? -

Engineering’s ATLAS AI-powered ciently and completely in order to help platform. The evaluations proved to guide clean-up efforts. “Annotating

SPH Engineering/ University of Delaware be time-effective and more accurate side-scan sonar mosaics is very tedious in comparison to the detections of hu- and time consuming for human opera- system was able to train and then oper- man annotators. tors especially when we have such a ate over our entire map domain.”

The university got a shareable web- high abundance of targets and large This project was supported by grant map with located crab pots in ATLAS areas to cover,” said Trembanis. “Our funding from Delaware Sea Grant, the and a report with georeferenced spots initial training and testing with ATLAS School of Marine Science and Policy, in GeoJSON. This approach helped a has been encouraging. The ATLAS and the NOAA Marine Debris Program.

The sample dataset can be found at detector to work much faster and more interface was easy to use and within bit.ly/2TDcAaB consistently than the human annotators about 30 minutes of annotation, the www.marinetechnologynews.com 17

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