Use of robots and artificial intelligence to understand the deep sea

Artificial intelligence (AI) could help scientists shed new light on the variety of species living on the ocean floor, according to new research led by the University of Plymouth.

With increasing threats facing the marine environment, scientists desperately need more information about what inhabits the seabed in order to inform conservation and biodiversity management.

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) mounted with the latest cameras are now able to collect vast amounts of data, but a bottleneck is still created by humans having to process it.

In a new study published in Marine Ecology Progress Series, marine scientists and robotics experts tested the effectiveness of a computer vision (CV) system in potentially fulfilling that role.

They showed on average it is around 80% accurate in identifying various animals in images of the seabed, but can be up to 93% accurate for specific species if enough data is used to train the algorithm.

This, scientists say, demonstrates CV could soon be routinely employed to study marine animals and plants and lead to a major increase in data availability for conservation research and biodiversity management.

PhD student Nils Piechaud, lead author on the study, said: “Autonomous vehicles are a vital tool for surveying large areas of the seabed deeper than 60m (the depth most divers can reach). But we are currently not able to manually analyse more than a fraction of that data. This research shows AI is a promising tool but our AI classifier would still be wrong one out of five times, if it was used to identify animals in our images.

“This makes it an important step forward in dealing with the huge amounts of data being generated from the ocean floor, and shows it can help speed up analysis when used for detecting some species. But we are not at the point of considering it a suitable complete replacement for humans at this stage.”

The study was conducted as part of Deep Links, a research project funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, and led by the University of Plymouth, in collaboration with Oxford University, British Geological Survey and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee.