Gert Toming

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.

This project is based on the new paradigm of "flow as information", a groundbreaking approach for underwater sensing of multiscale flows in Nature. It will lead to new, optimized devices and methods to measure, classify and explore the underwater environment when traditional methods are too expensive or simply do not work. Flow as information is inspired by aquatic animals who have evolved advanced sensory systems which combine sensing and information processing into a single framework. The proposal will advance TalTech's underwater sensing technologies from working prototypes (TRL3 to TRL5) to tests in relevant operational environments (TRL6), and support technology transfer to Estonian and international firms. These devices and methods will provide researchers, industry and authorities with new and reliable sources of flow data during extreme climate and weather events where conventional devices fail and when critical infrastructure is at risk, such as during storm surges and floods.

Fish-AI is a real-time automatic video-based fish monitoring system developed by TalTech that automates reporting in accordance with EU requirements and significantly reduces labor costs. The system is compatible with various underwater cameras, detects different water conditions, and is able to adapt to them.