Ping, You've Got Whale: AI detection system alerts ships of whales in their path

It seems to me that getting companies to pay for products that will make crew try to dodge around whales with huge ships isn’t likely to be successful.

Someone should research “sounds that annoy whales that they can hear from a long way off” and then mandate putting a transducer on the front of the hull below the waterline, to run while underway.

Short summary is that this isn't going to work. I was involved with a company doing some development on whale detection AI. The vast majority of the time you just don't see enough of the animal to make reliable detections. And that is in a best case scenario, add in movement of the boat/camera, waves, sunlight reflections, and having to ignore a vast majority of potential things on/in the water that can look kind of like whales, but are not whales. Dolphins in particular.

This isn't a problem for AI/machine vision, IMO.

Related:

NOAA: Track Whale Detections With This Interactive Map - https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/track-whale-det...

NOAA: Passive Acoustic Cetacean Map - https://apps-nefsc.fisheries.noaa.gov/pacm/#/

WhaleMap - https://whalemap.org/WhaleMap/

Ships are pretty noisy and whales are pretty smart, so the obvious question is why don't they figure out that it is bad to get hit by a ship, that the ships don't see the whales and so aren't able to avoid them, and so move out of the way when a ship is approaching?

Is it that the noise from the ships is too low in frequency for the whale to be able to tell what direction it is from? If that is the case could the ships add a higher frequency emitter that the whales could localize, emitting some standardized pattern of pings that the whales could learn means ship?

Having sailed solo around the world, I know this well-intentioned idea won't work. Modern large ships can't change course quickly enough to avoid collisions with objects close enough to be detectable.

Any number of times, a large-ship captain would radio me saying, "Whatever you do, don't change course or speed -- we can get past you as long as you don't change anything."

And I was a distant sailboat with a radar reflector, not a subtle biological target at close range.

Hey this is cool!

I met people here in Australia doing similar work to spot whales during offshore gas exploration. It was basically a revolving IR camera looking for whale spouts

I'm kinda surprised the article doesn't mention (and I have no idea the feasibility of) a system that works in the opposite direction as well: somehow communicating via sound waves the speed, heading, and distance (maybe possible through some kind of doppler effect?) of a boat in such a way that whales will perceive and make themselves safe from collision.

Seems at least worth researching.

> Zitterbart’s aim is for ship captains to receive zero false alerts, so that every ping truly requires their attention. Removing human oversight risks flooding ship captains with false reports

This sounds great, as long as we're still on track for the whole "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision."

I don't want to be the one to explain to the whales, "No, look, it's not our fault that we killed your singing partner - the AI told us this was the correct route. See?"

It's disappointing that this title references active sonar, but the proposed solution is IR cameras. Is active sonar really not a solution here?

Now invent a thing that broadcasts the whale word for danger so they can get out of the way.

Incredible title.

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My first thought about reading this was how the Chinese whaling fleets would use this to their advantage. Not something I would be cool with and with any "good" technology, you have nefarious parties always looking to exploit it for their own ends.

2018: crypto system alerts ships of whales.

2012: cloud system alerts ships of whales.

2006: social media alerts ships of whales.

1998: internet alerts ships of whales.

1978: computer alerts ships of whales.

1938: sonar alerts ships of whales.

I think this such an awesome innovation but does anyone understand what incentivizes a ship’s captain to take the warnings seriously? Is this just reliant on people being good people? I haven’t worked with sailors but I did a lot of blue collar work when I was younger and there’s a pessimistic side to me that struggles to see many of those guys caring. I do hope I’m wrong.