What can artificial intelligence (AI) do to protect the environment? Someone thought of using artificial intelligence to monitor and analyze the resilience of coral reefs.

The Intel, Accenture Consulting and Sulubaaï Environmental Fund, a non-profit organization in the Philippines, launched the project named Corail, which aims to build a platform with artificial intelligence to monitor And analyze the resilience of coral reefs. Since its launch in May 2019, the project has collected 40,000 images of the coral reefs around Panga Taran Island in the Philippines. The researchers used these images to assess the health of the coral reefs in real time.


divers deploy Corail project underwater

if pilot project in the Philippines If successful, the Corail project can be used to monitor more endangered coral reef populations in the world. Coral reefs can not only protect the coastline from tropical storms, but also provide economic income for billions of people. With tourism and entertainment alone, it can generate $ 9.6 billion in value every year.

Specifically, the Corail project will initially deploy a buoy. The buoy is equipped with marine-grade solar panels, batteries and signal transmission equipment (may be WiFi or 4G). At the same time, the research team also equipped a camera attached to the mooring line. The calculation on the buoy is done by the Raspberry Pi and Intel Neural Computing Chip 2, and the PC computing chip on the shore is processed by the Intel Arria 10 FPGA.

To deploy a buoy, an artificial concrete reef is required. According to Intel, they used a Sulu Reef prosthesis to fuse live coral fragments that will grow and expand. Underwater platforms will not damage the environment, but also provide habitat for fish and marine life. The Sulua reef prosthesis was originally designed by the Sulubaaï Environmental Foundation in 2016 to improve the resilience of the coral ecosystem on the island and restore reefs damaged by explosive fishing. According to reports, any type of coral can be attached to the prosthesis, the survey showsThe survival rate of Sulu Jiao prosthesis in the first year was 76%.

The image captured by the camera periodically transmits data from the camera to the PC on the shore through the Azure application running on the chip. Accenture provides a customized machine learning model VASP to count and classify marine organisms, and send the data from the PC to the Azure cloud for collation and report formation.

Athina Kanioura, Accenture ’s Chief Analysis Officer, said: “The value of data depends on how quickly you can gather insights and make decisions. With the ability to perform real-time analysis of streaming video , VASP allows us to use rich data sources to manually monitor without destroying the underwater environment. “

A better understanding of the health of coral reefs can help Researchers monitor climate change trends. Whether it is pollution, ocean acidification, unsustainable fish fishing or rising water temperatures have directly affected the underwater ecosystem.

In the future, the Corail project team also plans to deploy an optimized AI classifier model and backup power supply. They also considered using an infrared camera, which can be used for night photography, and adjust the platform to study the migration rate of tropical fish and enter human-restricted underwater areas.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that the Corail project is not an environmental protection project where artificial intelligence technology was first tested. Last year, Intel also released the TrailGuard AI project, which is a collaboration with the non-profit organization Resolve to curb poaching by African elephants. In addition, Intel and Microsoft’s “AI for the Earth” program in collaboration with data science consulting firm Gramener can help ecologists understand the number of Antarctic penguins.