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Remote sensing techniques for automated marine mammals detection: a review of methods and current challenges
Marine mammals are under pressure from multiple threats, such as global climate change, bycatch, and vessel collisions. In this context, more frequent and spatially extensive surveys for abundance and distribution studies are necessary to inform conservation efforts. Marine mammal surveys have been...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
PeerJ Inc.
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9220915/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35757165 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.13540 |
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author | Rodofili, Esteban N. Lecours, Vincent LaRue, Michelle |
author_facet | Rodofili, Esteban N. Lecours, Vincent LaRue, Michelle |
author_sort | Rodofili, Esteban N. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Marine mammals are under pressure from multiple threats, such as global climate change, bycatch, and vessel collisions. In this context, more frequent and spatially extensive surveys for abundance and distribution studies are necessary to inform conservation efforts. Marine mammal surveys have been performed visually from land, ships, and aircraft. These methods can be costly, logistically challenging in remote locations, dangerous to researchers, and disturbing to the animals. The growing use of imagery from satellite and unoccupied aerial systems (UAS) can help address some of these challenges, complementing crewed surveys and allowing for more frequent and evenly distributed surveys, especially for remote locations. However, manual counts in satellite and UAS imagery remain time and labor intensive, but the automation of image analyses offers promising solutions. Here, we reviewed the literature for automated methods applied to detect marine mammals in satellite and UAS imagery. The performance of studies is quantitatively compared with metrics that evaluate false positives and false negatives from automated detection against manual counts of animals, which allows for a better assessment of the impact of miscounts in conservation contexts. In general, methods that relied solely on statistical differences in the spectral responses of animals and their surroundings performed worse than studies that used convolutional neural networks (CNN). Despite mixed results, CNN showed promise, and its use and evaluation should continue. Overall, while automation can reduce time and labor, more research is needed to improve the accuracy of automated counts. With the current state of knowledge, it is best to use semi-automated approaches that involve user revision of the output. These approaches currently enable the best tradeoff between time effort and detection accuracy. Based on our analysis, we identified thermal infrared UAS imagery as a future research avenue for marine mammal detection and also recommend the further exploration of object-based image analysis (OBIA). Our analysis also showed that past studies have focused on the automated detection of baleen whales and pinnipeds and that there is a gap in studies looking at toothed whales, polar bears, sirenians, and mustelids. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9220915 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | PeerJ Inc. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-92209152022-06-24 Remote sensing techniques for automated marine mammals detection: a review of methods and current challenges Rodofili, Esteban N. Lecours, Vincent LaRue, Michelle PeerJ Conservation Biology Marine mammals are under pressure from multiple threats, such as global climate change, bycatch, and vessel collisions. In this context, more frequent and spatially extensive surveys for abundance and distribution studies are necessary to inform conservation efforts. Marine mammal surveys have been performed visually from land, ships, and aircraft. These methods can be costly, logistically challenging in remote locations, dangerous to researchers, and disturbing to the animals. The growing use of imagery from satellite and unoccupied aerial systems (UAS) can help address some of these challenges, complementing crewed surveys and allowing for more frequent and evenly distributed surveys, especially for remote locations. However, manual counts in satellite and UAS imagery remain time and labor intensive, but the automation of image analyses offers promising solutions. Here, we reviewed the literature for automated methods applied to detect marine mammals in satellite and UAS imagery. The performance of studies is quantitatively compared with metrics that evaluate false positives and false negatives from automated detection against manual counts of animals, which allows for a better assessment of the impact of miscounts in conservation contexts. In general, methods that relied solely on statistical differences in the spectral responses of animals and their surroundings performed worse than studies that used convolutional neural networks (CNN). Despite mixed results, CNN showed promise, and its use and evaluation should continue. Overall, while automation can reduce time and labor, more research is needed to improve the accuracy of automated counts. With the current state of knowledge, it is best to use semi-automated approaches that involve user revision of the output. These approaches currently enable the best tradeoff between time effort and detection accuracy. Based on our analysis, we identified thermal infrared UAS imagery as a future research avenue for marine mammal detection and also recommend the further exploration of object-based image analysis (OBIA). Our analysis also showed that past studies have focused on the automated detection of baleen whales and pinnipeds and that there is a gap in studies looking at toothed whales, polar bears, sirenians, and mustelids. PeerJ Inc. 2022-06-20 /pmc/articles/PMC9220915/ /pubmed/35757165 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.13540 Text en ©2022 Rodofili et al. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited. |
spellingShingle | Conservation Biology Rodofili, Esteban N. Lecours, Vincent LaRue, Michelle Remote sensing techniques for automated marine mammals detection: a review of methods and current challenges |
title | Remote sensing techniques for automated marine mammals detection: a review of methods and current challenges |
title_full | Remote sensing techniques for automated marine mammals detection: a review of methods and current challenges |
title_fullStr | Remote sensing techniques for automated marine mammals detection: a review of methods and current challenges |
title_full_unstemmed | Remote sensing techniques for automated marine mammals detection: a review of methods and current challenges |
title_short | Remote sensing techniques for automated marine mammals detection: a review of methods and current challenges |
title_sort | remote sensing techniques for automated marine mammals detection: a review of methods and current challenges |
topic | Conservation Biology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9220915/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35757165 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.13540 |
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