Over the past few years, the University of Delaware has participated in a state program that supports rescuing abandoned crab pots from the seabed and researches technologies to make the search process more effective. It has advanced sonar surveys from a boat with further map storage and processing in SPH Engineering’s ATLAS AI-powered platform. The evaluations proved to be time-effective and more accurate in comparison to the detections of human annotators.

Blue crab fishing is a popular commercial and recreational activity throughout the United States. In order to catch these crabs, people place crab pots on the seafloor, tied to a float with a rope. When people lose these items, they can stay on the seafloor for years, turning into deadly traps for fish and crabs. 

The university got a shareable web-map with located crab pots in ATLAS and a report with georeferenced spots in GeoJSON. This approach helped a detector to work much faster and more consistently than the human annotators to support guided detection and recovery of ghost pots. 

The sample data set can be found here.