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Associate Professor Euan Harvey and his colleagues have spent literally thousands of hours looking at underwater video of fish recorded in remote locations around Australia and New Zealand.

If all goes to plan, they’ll be able to automatically count and measure the fish using computer software rather than human eyes glued to a video screen.

Associate Professor Harvey, who works with UWA’s School of Plant Biology and the Oceans Institute, and his research partners have been awarded a three-year, $450,000 Australian Research Council Linkage grant to develop a computer algorithm to count and measure fish.

At the moment, Harvey and his colleagues film fish communities by placing a stereo-video system in a frame similar to a craypot which is dropped on the ocean floor, along with a bag of bait to attract fish.

But using people to count and measure the fish on resulting video is incredibly time-consuming and expensive.

“At the moment, depending on where we are dropping the cameras and how many species and individual fish there are, it will take between two and three and a half hours to process one video,” says Assoc/Professor Harvey.

“If you put that in dollar terms, that’s probably about an extra $100 per deployment for someone to sit there and analyse them.”

Harvey and his team records up to 2,000 hours of fish video a year.

“At the moment, we’ve got about 28 stereo video systems, and they could be in use anywhere from the Kimberley and the North-West Shelf to Guam or Hawaii,” he says.

“What we do is go to an area and deploy up to 10 cameras at any one time for an hour, pick them up and then move them to another site, so we get broad spatial coverage.

“We’re working with the Fisheries Department, CSIRO and the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences (AIMS), NOAA, The National Museum in New Zealand and staff and students from other universities, and the cameras will go to wherever the work is based.” Harvey and his colleague Professor

Mark Shortis from RMIT University in Melbourne pioneered the use of stereo-video as a tool to monitor and measure fish populations about 18 years ago.

“That was the key thing, because using basic trigonometry you can calculate x, y, and z points – if you’ve got two points you can calculate the distance between them and that means you can measure the length of fish very accurately,” explains Harvey.

The algorithm project promises to make it easier for marine agencies to monitor finfish communities as well as improve husbandry in aquaculture, with work on developing the algorithm set to begin early next year.

“I would hope that we’d start by February or March,” he says.

Media references

Tony Malkovic (on behalf of UWA Oceans Institute)  (+61 4) 11 103 398

Michael Sinclair-Jones (UWA Public Affairs)  (+61 8)  6488 3229  /  (+61 4) 00 700 783