Data Study Group Final Report: CEFAS - Automated identification of sea pens using OpenCV and machine learning

Data Study Groups are week-long events at The Alan Turing Institute bringing together some of the country’s top talent from data science, artificial intelligence, and wider fields, to analyse real-world data science challenges.

Sea pens are colonial animals closely related to the corals that live attached to the sea floor. They generally form a feather-shaped colony with a horny skeleton. They respond to multiple human interventions (contamination and human waste, fishing, boats, etc.) and therefore they are an indicator of the health of their ecosystem. Sea pen communities are Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems (VMEs), which have been proposed as indicators of good conservation status for mud habitats. The goal of this challenge is to study their distribution and abundance, so their presence can be used to evaluate whether the seabed is exposed to good water quality and is undamaged by fishing gear.