Getting High for Marine Conservation
David Gaspard, a marine biologist living in Squamish, is using drones to capture footage of whales off the coast of eastern Canada. He asked the ML group for a brainstorming session. The aim of David’s research is to develop a non-invasive method of assessing the health of individual whales. The process would involve large amounts of image processing
David gave a talk about his upcoming masters project, in which he will use the size of whales as measured from fixed height drone footage as a proxy for whale health.
12 people attended, including one new member who’s expertise in photogrophy, light and lenses contributed some ideas to David’s approach.
At the time, David was manually measuring the size of the whales, from footage taken by drones at fixed heights.
We explored ideas on how to use machine learning to help reduce the labour involved during this step.
We discussed using this idea as the basis for a hackathon.