Scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and Wageningen University in the Netherlands have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model that recognises plastic objects floating on the water in satellite images. This could make it possible to eliminate this waste using ships.
The accumulation of waste at sea is certainly visible on Sentinel 2 satellite images from the European Space Agency (ESA). But since we are talking about terabytes of data, they need to be analysed automatically using AI models, EPFL said in a press release on Thursday.
Scientists have developed an AI-based detector that estimates the probability of the presence of marine debris for each pixel of Sentinel-2 satellite images. The detector remains accurate even in difficult conditions, such as when cloud cover and haze prevent existing models from accurately identifying debris. ...