Helena Carmen Udu

Globally, fish have a market value of 150 billion EUR per year. In addition, the implementation of the European Water Framework and Habitats Directives underscores the necessity for long-term environmental monitoring across the European Union. Economically and ecologically significant fish species, such as Salmon and the critically endangered European Eel are both native to Estonia, and their life cycles require migration from marine to freshwater environments. Current academic solutions for fish monitoring are too slow and expensive, and commercial solutions with AI still rely on manual processing of thousands videos at each location. The "AquaID" project aims to develop viable systems capable of automatically detecting and counting wild fish with significantly enhanced performance. This will be achieved through the utilization of custom hardware and underwater artificial intelligence methods developed at TalTech, in collaboration with international academic and commercial partners.