Google has developed a new AI tool that can help marine biologists better understand and communicate with coral reef ecosystems and health. SurfPerch, a tool created with Google Research and DeepMind, is trained on thousands of hours of reef audio recordings to help scientists studying reefs “listen to reef health from the inside” and track reef activity at night. . Being in deep or murky water.
The project began by inviting the public to listen to the sounds of the reef via the web. Over the past year, visitors to the Google Calling in Corals website have been told to listen to more than 400 hours of reef audio from sites around the world and click when they hear a fish. The result is a “bioacoustic” data set focused on coral reef health. By crowdsourcing this effort, Google was able to create a new library of fish sounds that was used to fine-tune its AI tool, SurfPerch. SurfPerch can now be quickly trained to detect new reef sounds.
“This will allow us to analyze new data sets much more efficiently than was previously possible, eliminating the need for training on expensive GPU processors and opening up new opportunities to understand reef communities and conserve coral reefs. “There is,” says a Google blog post about the project. The post was co-authored by Steve Simpson, a professor of marine biology at the University of Bristol, UK, who studies coral ecosystems with a focus on areas such as climate change and restoration, and Ben Williams, a marine biologist at University College London. .
Moreover, the researchers realized that they could improve SurfPerch's model performance by leveraging bird records. We found that although bird sounds and reef recordings are very different, there are common patterns between bird songs and fish sounds that the model can learn from.
After combining Calling Our Corals data with SurfPerch in initial trials, researchers were able to discover differences between protected and unprotected coral reefs in the Philippines, track restoration outcomes in Indonesia, and better understand their relationship with fish communities in the Great Barrier Reef. There was.
Google says the project continues today, with new audio added to the Calling in Our Corals website to help further train the AI model.
