Sharks are gathering on a California beach. SharkEye’s AI is trying to keep swimmers safe.

CNN
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On summer mornings, local kids gather at Padaro Beach in California to learn to surf the gentle waves. For a few years now, the beach has also become a popular gathering spot for young great white sharks.

That led to the launch of SharkEye, an initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Benioff Oceanographic Laboratory (BOSL), which uses drones to monitor what’s happening beneath the waves.

If a shark is spotted, the SharkEye app sends a text message to about 80 people who have signed up for alerts, including local lifeguards, surf shop owners and parents of children taking lessons.

In recent years, other initiatives have witnessed Officials and lifeguards from New York to Sydney are using drones to keep beachgoers safe, monitoring the video feeds from the camera. This requires the pilot to stay focused on the screen, facing choppy waters and glare from the sun, to distinguish sharks from paddlers, seals and undulating strands of seaweed. One study found that drones monitored by humans only detected sharks. About 60% of the time.

SharkEye — part research program, part community safety tool — uses the video it collects to analyze shark behavior. It also feeds its footage into a machine-learning computer vision model — a type of artificial intelligence technology that enables computers to gather information from images and videos — to train it to spot great white sharks near Padaro Beach, near the town of Padaro. Santa Barbara.

“Automating shark detection could… (also) lead to” “This is going to be really beneficial to a lot of communities outside of our own here in California,” Neil Nathan, a project scientist at BOSL who graduated from Stanford University with a master’s degree in environmental studies a few years ago, told CNN.

The rise of drones and the proliferation of social media can make it seem like sharks are everywhere. Rising ocean temperatures aren’t helping, though, as they’re pushing sharks into new habitats, and young great whites, which can grow to about eight to 10 feet long, like to hang out close to shore, making them more visible to beachgoers.

Shark attacks, however, are rare. In 2023, 69 people worldwide were bitten unprovoked — in line with an average of 63 incidents per year between 2018 and 2022. Only 10 of them died, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History.International Shark Attack File.

Although no fatal attacks have been recorded at Badaro Beach, some community members became concerned when sharks started hanging around there.

That’s why SharkEye has been running regular drone flights to monitor the coast for about five years, and once managed to spot 15 young great white sharks in a single day.

Initial tests suggest the AI ​​technology is already working “incredibly well,” spotting most sharks that humans can spot, and sometimes sharks that humans miss, perhaps because they were swimming too deep to be easily detected, Nathan said.

The project began field testing this summer. SharkEye uses artificial intelligence to take on drone pilots. The pilot scans the area and counts how many sharks he spots. The SharkEye model then analyzes the video to see how many sharks it can find.

Today, community alerts rely on human analysis. If all goes well, those reports could be powered by artificial intelligence — with manual monitoring and testing — by the end of the season, or early next summer, Nathan said. In the future, the process could be fully automated, making it faster and perhaps more accurate.

Artificial Intelligence and Wildlife

artificial intelligence Technologies are Technology is being used in countless ways to mitigate human-wildlife conflict. In India, AI-powered cameras alert villagers when tigers approach their livestock, and in Australia, technology is being used to manage dangerous creatures.

Reaper Company Academics have created what they say are the world’s first shark-identification algorithms, which were used on drones a few years ago. The latest version of the software is being tested across Queensland, Australia, Mexico and the Caribbean to detect sharks and crocodiles.

However, AI is not widely used to detect sharks. Surf Life Saving New South Wales, which protects dozens of beaches along the state’s coastline, including Sydney’s famous Bondi Beach, uses drones to detect sharks. 50 locationsBut a company spokesperson told CNN that their drones do not currently use artificial intelligence.

A group from an Australian university has worked on AI-powered shark detection tools. Written in 2022 The technology may struggle when faced with conditions that were not present in the training data.

SharkEye plans to make its model free and available for researchers to modify or build upon, and to create an AI-powered app that would make it easier for people like lifeguards and drone enthusiasts to play back their footage. That could help keep people safe, but it could also allow humans to better understand and protect sharks.

Nathan said it remains to be seen how much retraining would be required to expand SharkEye to other locations. He hopes that if drone pilots fly at the same speed and altitude, they won’t have as many problems elsewhere in California, where the coastline is similar.

Honolulu officials said this month they are considering launching a shark-monitoring program using drones, According to local mediaIf SharkEye’s technology is used in places like Hawaii, where tiger sharks are a major concern and where water color varies, more extensive retraining may be necessary. But Nathan said SharkEye is open to working with other regions to help adapt the model.

“Communities want to gain this knowledge and awareness so that it is safer to share the water with these creatures,” Nathan said. “Sharks are an amazing species that we are constantly learning new things about.”