OFI SF5 Advanced capacity for autonomous detection of green sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis)

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Over the last 5 years, Dr. Gagnon and his industry partners have shown that a Newfoundland green sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis) gonad industry is both achievable and highly desirable. There is a pressing need to develop new technologies to quickly and efficiently collect green sea urchins, and more information is needed to sustainably manage sea urchin stocks and their habitats. Remotely operated vehicles (ROV) offer this potential, yet there is currently no commercially available ROV solution for this specific purpose. To capitalize on momentum created by Dr. Gagnons previous research, the proposed OFI Seed Fund project aims to develop the foundation of advanced ROV capacity for intelligent, semi-autonomous recognition and collection of urchins under natural environmental conditions and habitat characteristics. This multidisciplinary project will build sea urchin identification capacity based on image recognition and machine learning. It will be addressed by developing an integrated suite of computer programs that can recognize and electronically tag urchins on videos of seabed acquired with standard and 3-D submersible HD and laser camera systems, and progressively improve at urchin recognition via self-learning capacity. The project will be assigned to a top-notch PhD candidate with relevant background in Artificial Neural Networks and Computer Vision. It will act as a springboard enabling three researchers from different disciplines at Memorial University and their colleagues from NRC and Kraken Robotics (industry partner) to collaborate on this new initiative that presents a strong potential for patenting/commercialization and eventual inclusion of other marine species.