Designing a mobile app that identifies in real time the fishing activity of vessels

A multidisciplinary group made up of specialists from the University of Huelva, the Miguel Hernández University and the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO) has designed an revolutionary built-in system for monitoring fishing exercise primarily based on the usage of sensors often put in in a smartphone to detect in actual time, and in accordance with the motion of the vessel, what sort of fishing exercise is being carried out on board. This data is related within the fishing sector for estimating the quantity of fish in a selected space of the ocean and calculating catches.

The novelty of this low-cost app is its straightforward set up in any cellular machine and the quick transmission of knowledge in actual time, in beneath a second. As well as, as reported within the research entitled “Is the vessel fishing? Discrimination of fishing activity with low-cost intelligent mobile devices through traditional and heuristic approaches,” printed within the journal Knowledgeable Methods with Purposes, this instrument makes it doable to find out with nice precision the place the vessel is situated, no matter its measurement, and the way a lot time it spends fishing.

This mobile app, known as FAMIS, supplies prompt data on the working section of a vessel. On this respect, the time a vessel spends fishing is a figuring out issue for assessing fishing effort, that’s, for calculating the quantity of catches in a specific space and the quantity of fish that could be current in that place at that exact time.

Present methods for monitoring fishing vessels point out the placement of boats over an extended time interval (roughly at the least each three minutes), require prior set up on the deck of the vessel, and are managed by the related fishing authorities.

These are monitoring methods much like GPS that ship a sign to land. “This tool allows us to know the position of a boat, but during its stay at sea we don’t know how much time it has spent casting the nets, fishing and collecting all the material. The FAMIS app goes further and makes it possible to identify from the movement of the vessel what fishing maneuver it is carrying out at all times,” Fundación Descubre was advised by Juan Carlos Gutiérrez Estrada, researcher on the University of Huelva and one of many authors of this research.

The specialists, specialised in Pc Science, Biology and Marine Science, have utilized this method as a result of each smartphones and tablets carry built-in sensors that enable to determine the motion of the ship from the info they document. “Depending on the type of maneuver (whether the boat is accelerating, pitching, rolling, etc.), the vessel has a characteristic movement that is reflected in the accelerometer. They also allow us to know whether the vessel is casting its net, fishing or retrieving its gear,” says Gutiérrez Estrada.

Synthetic intelligence on board

This technique, which sends data as quickly because the mobile phone is positioned on the deck of the boat, has been examined utilizing totally different statistical strategies and artificial intelligence fashions primarily based on synthetic neural networks and support-vector machines. The app shows numerically and graphically on its display screen all the data captured by the totally different sensors: GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetic subject. Probably the most environment friendly mannequin might be built-in into the app and can present details about the exercise that the boat is performing in actual time.

To reveal the usefulness of those sensors, exams have been carried out from the oceanographic vessel Miguel Oliver on one in every of its voyages. This 70-meter lengthy and 12-meter large vessel is supplied with technological tools for navigation and for fishing and oceanographic analysis. “This boat makes it possible to record four to six net hauls per day, and to obtain data under very adverse conditions, given its large displacement and the lightweight characteristics of the fishing gear used for sampling,” says the co-author of this research.

In accordance with the specialists, the mannequin can be utilized with any sort of vessel, as it may be calibrated and tailored to be used on small boats. “The main advantage of this app for the fishing industry is its ability to count the fishing effort, a fundamental parameter for estimating the relative abundance of fish in the sea,” says Gutiérrez Estrada.

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