A project in support of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is pairing sensor-equipped drones with machine-learning applications in an effort to automate the identification and mapping of marine waste and create effective methods for its collection and disposal.
NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS) and Oregon State University are leading the drive to construct an integrated system to spot and identify large volumes of marine waste. Drones flying with polarimetric cameras capture images that are fed into a machine-learning computer program to identify, classify, and map the marine debris in collected images. The final purpose of the asset will be to assist the fast and effective clean-up of the floating or beached litter, which often injures and kills marine life, interferes with navigation safety, and poses a threat to human health.
Human-made pollution in the seas and along coastlines is a massive and growing…
