Underwater and airborne monitoring of marine ecosystems and debris

Advancing the sustainable use and conservation of marine environments is urgent. Tons of debris including macro- and microplastics generated on land are entering the oceans, marine resources are decreasing, and many species are facing extinction. Though satellite remote sensing techniques are commonly used for global environmental monitoring, it is still difficult to detect small objects such as floating debris on the vast ocean surface, and the ecosystems deep in the oceans where light does not reach are unobservable. An autonomous monitoring system consisting of optimally controlled robots is required for acquiring spatiotemporally rich marine data. However, object detection in marine environments, which is a necessary function the robots should have for underwater and aerial monitoring, has not been extensively studied. Here, we argue that state-of-the-art deep-learning-based object detection works well for monitoring underwater ecosystems and marine debris. We found that by using the deep-learning object-detection algorithm YOLO v3, underwater sea life and debris floating on the ocean surface can be detected with mean average precision of 69.6% and 77.2%, respectively. We anticipate our results to be a starting point for developing tools for enabling safe and precise acquisition of marine data to elucidate and utilize this last frontier.