Artificial Intelligence Development and Implementation

Biotactic began developing an AI-based program to count fish passage at dams in 2013. Nearly a decade later the Biotactic Research Artificial Intelligence Network, a deep learning artificial intelligence program, has been meticulously trained and tested by Biotactic's team of machine learning and computer vision programmers and senior fish biologists. Using a propriety dataset gathered over the past 20 years through our BRAVO systems and network, the BRAIN has been trained with well over 20 000 annotations. Our extensive and ever evolving training and test data sets have allowed our models to obtain a high degree of accuracy detecting fish in a variety of complex environments, water conditions, during the day or at night in infrared, at a variety of approach angles, through various movements and with different proportions of the fish within the camera field of view. The BRAIN not only has the ability to accurately count fish, but tracks fish movement throughout a video clip and differentiates between upstream and downstream movement and, in the context of fish ladders and fences, whether that movement occurred through the structure (passage) or not. The BRAIN can currently be used through two streams. Video data collected can be manually fed into the BRAIN and processed or cameras can run a live feed through our BRAVO network allowing the BRAIN to automatically process videos and provide near-real time fish counts, movement and passage information.