Towards Low Cost Automated Monitoring of Life Below Water to De-risk Ocean-Based Carbon Dioxide Removal and Clean Power

Oceans will play a crucial role in our efforts to combat the growing climate emergency. Researchers have proposed several strategies to harness greener energy through oceans and use oceans as carbon sinks. However, the risks these strategies might pose to the ocean and marine ecosystem are not well understood. It is imperative that we quickly develop a range of tools to monitor ocean processes and marine ecosystems alongside the technology to deploy these solutions on a large scale into the oceans. Large arrays of inexpensive cameras placed deep underwater coupled with machine learning pipelines to automatically detect, classify, count and estimate fish populations have the potential to continuously monitor marine ecosystems and help study the impacts of these solutions on the ocean. In this proposal, we discuss the challenges presented by a dark artificially lit underwater video dataset captured 500m below the surface, propose potential solutions to address these challenges, and present preliminary results from detecting and classifying 6 species of fish in deep underwater camera data.