Towards a coastal marine litter observatory with combination of drone imagery, artificial intelligence, and citizen science

<p>The presence of plastic litters in the coastal zone has been recognized as a significant problem. It can dramatically affect flora and fauna and lead to severe economic impacts on coastal communities, tourism and fishing industries. Traditional beach litter reports include individual transects on the beach, reporting on the litter's presence through a dedicated measuring protocol. In the new era of drone imagery, a new integrated coastal marine litter observatory is proposed. This observatory is based on aerial images acquired through citizen science using low cost self-owned drones and the automatic identification of litter accumulation zones through computer vision. The methodology consists of four steps: i) a dedicated protocol for acquiring drone imagery from non-experienced citizens using commercial drones, ii) image pre-processing (image tiling and geo-enrichment) and crowdsourced annotation, iii) data classification to litter and no litter though an artificial intelligence classification approach and iv) marine litter density maps creation and reporting. The resulted density maps currently are produced calculating the tiles containing litter at areas of hundred square meters on the beach and the entire process requires some minutes to run once the aerial data is uploaded online. The density maps automatically are reported to a spatial data infrastructure, ideal for time series analysis. Classification accuracy calculated against manual identification of 77.6%. The coastal marine litter observatory presents several benefits against traditional reporting methods, i.e. improved measurement of the policies against plastic pollution, validating marine litter transportation models, monitoring the SDG Indicator 14.1.1, and most important, guiding the cleaning efforts towards areas with a significant amount of litter.</p>

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A Citizen Science Unmanned Aerial System Data Acquisition Protocol and Deep Learning Techniques for the Automatic Detection and Mapping of Marine Litter Concentrations in the Coastal Zone

Drones ◽

10.3390/drones5010006 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

pp. 6

Author(s):

Apostolos Papakonstantinou ◽

Marios Batsaris ◽

Spyros Spondylidis ◽

Konstantinos Topouzelis

Keyword(s):

Deep Learning ◽

Data Acquisition ◽

Citizen Science ◽

Coastal Zone ◽

Automatic Detection ◽

Monitoring Methods ◽

Monitoring Method ◽

Marine Litter ◽

Density Maps ◽

Learning Techniques

Marine litter (ML) accumulation in the coastal zone has been recognized as a major problem in our time, as it can dramatically affect the environment, marine ecosystems, and coastal communities. Existing monitoring methods fail to respond to the spatiotemporal changes and dynamics of ML concentrations. Recent works showed that unmanned aerial systems (UAS), along with computer vision methods, provide a feasible alternative for ML monitoring. In this context, we proposed a citizen science UAS data acquisition and annotation protocol combined with deep learning techniques for the automatic detection and mapping of ML concentrations in the coastal zone. Five convolutional neural networks (CNNs) were trained to classify UAS image tiles into two classes: (a) litter and (b) no litter. Testing the CCNs’ generalization ability to an unseen dataset, we found that the VVG19 CNN returned an overall accuracy of 77.6% and an f-score of 77.42%. ML density maps were created using the automated classification results. They were compared with those produced by a manual screening classification proving our approach’s geographical transferability to new and unknown beaches. Although ML recognition is still a challenging task, this study provides evidence about the feasibility of using a citizen science UAS-based monitoring method in combination with deep learning techniques for the quantification of the ML load in the coastal zone using density maps.

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INSPIRE standards as framework for artificial intelligence applications: a landslides example

10.5194/nhess-2020-134 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Gioachino Roberti ◽

Jacob McGregor ◽

Sharon Lam ◽

David Bigelow ◽

Blake Boyko ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Artificial Intelligence ◽

European Union ◽

Spatial Data ◽

Landslide Susceptibility ◽

Semantic Networks ◽

Scientific Models ◽

Susceptibility Map ◽

The European Union ◽

Stream Network ◽

Data Infrastructure

Abstract. This study presents a landslide susceptibility map using an artificial intelligence (AI) approach that is based on standards set by the INSPIRE framework. We show how INSPIRE standards enhance the interoperability of geospatial data, and enable deeper knowledge development for their interpretation and explainability in AI applications. INSPIRE is a European Union Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) initiative to standardize spatial data across borders to ensure interoperability for management of cross-border infrastructure and environmental issues. Despite the theoretical effectiveness of the SDI, very few real-world applications make use of INSPIRE standards. We designed an ontology of landslides, embedded with INSPIRE vocabularies and then aligned geology, stream network and land cover data sets covering the Veneto region of Italy to the standards. INSPIRE was formally extended to include an extensive landslide type code list, a landslide size code list and the concept of landslide susceptibility to describe map application inputs and outputs. Using the terms in the ontology, we defined conceptual scientific models of slopes likely to generate landslides as well as map polygons representing real slopes. Both landslide models and map polygons were encoded as semantic networks and, by qualitative probabilistic comparison between the two, a similarity score was assigned. The score was then used as a proxy for landslide susceptibility and displayed in web map application. The use of INSPIRE-standardized vocabularies in ontologies that express scientific models promotes the adoption of the standards across the European Union and beyond. Further, this application facilitates the explainability of the generated results. We conclude that public and private organisations, within and outside the European Union, can enhance the value of their data by bringing them into INSPIRE-compliance for use in AI applications.

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