New system processes images of the Antarctic seabed in seconds, replacing analyzes that took years.
In the dark, icy waters of the planet’s southern tip, cameras and algorithms come together to reveal creatures that the human eye has never seen.
Scientists from (BAS) resorted to to transform the way in which the . What once could take years to analyze is now done in seconds – and each new image can reveal a species the world has never seen.
A new tool developed by the BAS Artificial Intelligence Laboratory promises to change the pace of scientific exploration. Capable of processing high-resolution photographs and videos captured by underwater cameras, the system quickly identifies and labels deep-sea species, from sea stars and corals to sponges and fish, in an environment
Trained on 100 carefully annotated images during the German expedition in the Weddell Sea, at depths between 1,900 and 2,150 meters, the AI model can overcome obstacles such as overlapping organisms and the presence of species not yet cataloged in waters with temperatures below zero.
The marine biogeographer Huw Griffiths highlights that technology represents an unprecedented leap in biodiversity monitoring.
“This drastic change in the speed at which we process data through AI means that something we collected ten years ago could still be being processed today. But now, if we go out there, we can have the answers before we even get back from the ship — meaning we can act immediately, and the data won’t be out of date by the time we know what’s going on,” Griffiths told Reuters.
Previously, manual labeling could take up to eight hours per image. Now, with human supervision, the system allows real-time analysis on board research vessels.
“We know that we find many new species in Antarctica. Ten to 20% of the animals we capture in a net may be new to science, each time we go down. So, we know that this system will find new species”, added the researcher.
is home to more than 94% of the species in the Southern Oceanmost of which are endemic and perfectly adapted to extreme conditions of ice and darkness.
But these fragile communities are under threat. With the and human activities altering habitatsthe BAS system is now processing around 30,000 images captured on the Antarctic Peninsula and the Weddell Sea, to try to understand what is changing.
Researchers warn that habitats are at risk of losses, worsening the decline in global biodiversity.
“It’s changes in numbers, changes in proportions — but also anything that we haven’t seen before, or something that we used to see a lot of and has since disappeared — that are warning signs of climate change.”
