AI Revolutionizes Antarctic Seafloor Research
(MENAFN) New developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are revolutionizing the way scientists explore the delicate and distant ecosystems of the Antarctic seafloor.
Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey have introduced a cutting-edge tool capable of identifying animals in seafloor images and videos within seconds—an operation that once took hours for each individual image.
This technological leap enables real-time image analysis aboard research vessels, allowing scientists to promptly determine which parts of Antarctica's seafloor require special conservation measures.
The seafloor in this region houses over 94% of all known species of the Southern Ocean, many of which are exclusive to this area.
Cameron Trotter, a machine learning research scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, explained, “This new AI technology will massively speed up how marine biologists analyze the data they collect.”
He continued, “Before we developed this tool, image analysis was performed by hand, taking up to eight hours per photo. By having the AI work alongside the human experts, we can cut this down to a few seconds per photo.”
The AI system was trained using high-resolution images captured from Germany’s polar research vessel, the RV Polarstern, in the Weddell Sea.
Trotter highlighted that the images used to train the AI were “packed full of weird and unusually shaped animals, often living on top of each other, some of which have never been seen before.”
By learning from 100 carefully annotated images, the AI is now proficient at identifying common Antarctic seafloor creatures, including starfish, corals, sponges, and various fish species.
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