OERA Webinar Series: Automating the post-processing of noisy hydroacoustic fish surveying for monitoring tidal turbines

March 25, 2021 1:00pm – 2:00pm ADT

Jennifer LaPlante, Executive Director, DeepSense
Dr. Chris Whidden, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University

DeepSense partnered with the Fundy Ocean Research Center for Energy (FORCE) and the Offshore Energy Research Association of Nova Scotia (OERA) to create a machine learning model to automate the post-processing and analysis of hydroacoustic fish surveys in extremely noisy environments suitable for tidal turbines such as the Bay of Fundy. FORCE use hydroacoustic echosounder surveys to evaluate the impact of tidal turbines on marine life in the Bay of Fundy.  In order to analyze the survey data, manual pre-processing is currently required to annotate the data. Manual processes are time consuming and can create the opportunity for inconsistency. For this project, a machine learning model was trained to detect and filter noise in the hydroacoustic sensor data. By identifying “bad regions” in the hydroacoustic data with a model and automatically extracting these regions from survey data, the team is able to more accurately and consistently clean data while significantly reducing the manual effort required to pre-process the data. 

The OERA webinar series is hosted in Zoom.