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Crown-of-Thorns Starfish Detection Pipeline
This repository shows how to detect crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) using a pre-trained COTS detector implemented in TensorFlow.
Description
Coral reefs are some of the most diverse and important ecosystems in the world, however they face a number of rising threats that have resulted in massive global declines. In Australia, outbreaks of the coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) have been shown to cause major coral loss, with just 15 starfish in a hectare being able to strip a reef of 90% of its coral tissue. While COTS naturally exist in the Indo-Pacific, overfishing and excess run-off nutrients have led to massive outbreaks that are devastating already vulnerable coral communities.
Controlling COTS populations is critical to promoting coral growth and resilience, so Google teamed up with Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, to tackle this problem. We trained ML object detection models to help scale underwater surveys, enabling the monitoring and mapping out these harmful invertebrates with the ultimate goal of helping control teams to address and prioritize outbreaks.
Get started
Open the notebook in Colab to run the COTS detection pipeline.