Introducing Our Exciting New Project!
The Pioneering AI 4 CORALS

Reefscapers has now transplanted more than 7,800 coral frames in the Maldives, each of them supporting 30 to 110 fragments of coral. How are they doing? Which species grow better? Are there places where they have better chances of survival?

To answer all these questions and many more, we have been collecting pictures of our frames every 6 months. And our autonomous catamaran will help us take a lot more! But what to do with more than 200,000 pictures?

For each fragment, we want to automatically detect what kind of coral it is, its size, and its health. Obviously, these observations are limited by the quality of our pictures. For instance, we cannot expect to identify the species from so far away. But we can still differentiate between larger families, such as Pocillopora or branching Acropora.

To achieve these goals and more, we are now using the latest in deep learning to automatically extract the valuable information from these pictures, using something called a convolutional neural network. This is a mathematical model that imitates neural connections from the brain and learns to detect objects in pictures.

First, we have to teach the software what we want it to recognise: coral frames, Acropora fragments, dead fragments, and so on… Once we show it enough training pictures, it is able to use this knowledge to infer the presence of such objects in new pictures that it hasn’t seen before.

In the future, we also hope to achieve a species identification model to provide other researchers with a reliable way to classify the corals that they work with.

To help save the coral reefs, we are putting robots and artificial intelligence to work …
… and we need YOUR HELP!

Welcome to the future of reef restoration, we couldn’t do it without you!
Thank you for your continued support.