The Sharkie App was developed as a research collaboration with the NSW Department for Primary Industries for use by NSW Surf Life Saving. The research was to extend our previous proof-of-concept research “Assessing the ability of deep learning techniques to perform real-time identification of shark species in live streaming video from drones.”
The Sharkie App runs under the Android operating system and has a display that has similar functionality to standard DJI drone apps, allowing pilots to control and monitor their drone in-flight. The App also contains an AI model that can identify marine fauna in real-time. It can also identify humans on or in the water.
The example image shows an example view of the Sharkie app, showing standard drone status and controls along the edges of the screen, together with a full-screen view directly from the drone. In this image, a boat (BOA) is identified in real-time in the lower-middle of the field of view. The Sharkie app is used to simultaneously control the drone flight, view the drone video feed and view AI model results with overplotted boxes of detected classes of fauna and humans, providing an all-in-one approach to marine fauna identification.
