On summer mornings, local kids like to gather at California’s Padaro Beach to learn to surf gentle whitewater waves. A few years ago, the beach also became a popular hangout for juvenile great white sharks.
This led to the launch of SharkEye, an initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory (BOSL) that uses drones to monitor what’s happening beneath the waves.
If a shark is spotted, SharkEye sends a text message to about 80 people who have signed up to receive alerts, including local lifeguards, surf shop owners and parents of children taking lessons.
In recent years, other initiatives have seen employees and lifeguards new York for Sidney using drones to keep beachgoers safe by monitoring video streamed from a camera. This requires the rider to remain focused on a screen, fighting the choppy water and glare of the sun, to differentiate the sharks from the paddleboarders, the seals and the waving strands of algae. A study found that human-monitored drones only detect sharks about 60% of the time.
SharkEye – part research program, part community safety tool – is using the video it collects to analyze shark behavior. It is also feeding its images into a computer vision machine learning model – a type of artificial intelligence (AI) technology that allows computers to gather information from images and videos – to train it to spot great white sharks near the beach of Padaro, near the city of Santa Barbara.
“Automating shark detection…could (also) be very useful for many communities outside of ours here in California,” Neil Nathan, project scientist at BOSL, who graduated from Stanford University with a master’s degree in environmental studies a few years ago. , he told CNN.
Human vs. shark detection AI
The rise in popularity of drones and the proliferation of social media can make it seem like sharks are everywhere. That doesn’t help warming ocean temperatures are pushing sharks into new habitats, and that juvenile great whites, which can reach about 8 to 10 feet long, like to stay close to shore, making them more visible to swimmers.
However, shark attacks are rare. In 2023, 69 people worldwide were victims of unprovoked bites — which is in line with the average of 63 incidents annually between 2018 and 2022. Only 10 of them died, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History. International Shark Attack Archive.
Although there have been no fatal attacks recorded at Padaro Beach, some community members became concerned when sharks began roaming there.
That’s why SharkEye has been conducting regular drone flights to monitor the coast for about five years, once spotting 15 juvenile great white sharks in a single day.
Early tests indicate that the AI technology is already working “incredibly well,” detecting most sharks that a human can, and sometimes sharks that a human missed, perhaps because they were swimming too deep to be detected easily. Nathan said.
This summer, the project began testing its technology in the field, pitting drone pilots against AI. Your pilot scans the area and counts the number of sharks he sees. The SharkEye model then analyzes the video to see how many sharks it can find.
Today, community alerts are based on human analysis. If all goes well, those reports could be AI-assisted — with manual monitoring and checks — by the end of the season or early next summer, Nathan said. In the future, the process could even become fully automated, making it faster and potentially more accurate.
AI and wildlife
AI technologies are being leveraged in countless ways to mitigate human-wildlife conflict. In India, AI-enabled cameras are warning residents when tigers are approaching their livestock, and in Australia, technology is being used to control some of its dangerous creatures.
Ripper Corp. and academics pioneered what they consider to be the world’s first shark identification algorithms, which were used in drones a few years ago. The latest version of the software is being tested in the Australian state of Queensland, Mexico and the Caribbean to detect sharks and crocodiles.
However, AI is not yet widely used for shark detection. Surf Life Saving New South Wales, which protects dozens of beaches along the state’s coast, including Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach, uses drones in 50 locations. But a spokesperson told CNN that its drones do not currently use AI.
A group at an Australian university working on AI-enhanced shark detection tools wrote in 2021 that the technology may struggle to find conditions that were not present in the training data.
SharkEye plans to make its model free and available for researchers to alter or build on, and create an AI-powered app that’s easy for people like lifeguards and drone enthusiasts to display their footage. This could help keep people safe, but it would also allow humans to better understand and protect sharks.
Nathan said it’s not yet known how much training SharkEye will need to expand to other locations. He’s hopeful that if drone pilots fly at the same speed and altitude, they won’t have too many problems in other parts of California where the coastline is similar.
Officials in Honolulu said this month they are considering launching a drone shark surveillance program, according to local media. If SharkEye’s technology were used in places like Hawaii, where tiger sharks are a major concern and the hue of the water is different, more recycling would be needed. But Nathan said SharkEye is open to working with other locations to help adapt the model.
“Communities want to have this knowledge and awareness so that it is easier to share water more safely with these creatures,” said Nathan. “Sharks are an incredible species that we are still always learning new things about.”
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