GLOUCESTER POINT, Va. (WAVY) — The Virginia Institute of Marine Science is building a new mobile app that helps you identify a fish you just caught. But first, they need your photos.
Scientists at VIMS are creating an artificial intelligence they could put into a smartphone app which they hope will give both anglers and scientists a “collaborative tool” to both identify and manage different species.
Founder Lisa Kellogg, a senior research scientist at VIMS, said that their goal at VIMS is for users to open the app, point their phone at a fish, and hopefully the app will instantly tell them the species of the fish, size, weight, and more.
The app will also instantly provide information on whether that specific fish is legal to keep based on data, location, and local fishing regulations.
So what’s holding them back? The team must first train the software to recognize different species of fish, a process that requires lots of photos.
“We’re working on training models to identify fish and that requires at least 5,000 photos per species,” said Kellogg. “The more photos we have, the more accurate the models will be.”
To help gather photos, the team built the website recfish.org which VIMS scientists hope will make it easier for residents to submit their photos.
The team is particularly interested in photos of less common species and species that people rarely photograph. Although their initial goal is to identify fish species on the Chesapeake Bay, they say their long-term goal is to expand the app’s grasps across the East Coast and beyond.
