An army of plastic fighting drones is joining the fight

The world has been producing plastic since the 1950's, finding extremely rapid growth in the amount of waste generated in the 1980's. It wasn't until the 2010's that governments and other international bodies began to take steps towards addressing the problem of plastic pollution. Photos taken by the drones are being used by machine-learning algorithms to remotely detect plastic waste hotspots. As the world has come together to address the problem, we've found ways to monitor it in order to understand its progress together.

We've developed photo-taking drones used by machine-learning algorithms to remotely detect plastic waste hotspots. Plastic Tide's director, Peter Kohler developed his vision after discovering rubbish everywhere he went during a sailing trip in the South Pacific in 2008. He wanted to harness technology to track marine litter, measure the scale of the problem, as well as monitor the success of initiatives to limit plastic. Image result for drone plastic trash
A shot of a large trash hotspot in Thailand.

The idea is to use drone-mounted cameras to take thousands of aerial photos. These photos are then used to train an AI algorithm to recognize images of plastic trash and distinguish between shells, jellyfish or plastic bags or bottle tops. The end result will be an accurate, open-source map of the worst-polluted coastlines. The project started in the UK, but it has global ambitions to monitor the seabed and the sea surface.



Source: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/this-ai-is-learning-to-recognize-ocean-plastic-using-drone-photos?utm_source=Facebook%20Videos&utm_medium=Facebook%20Videos&utm_campaign=Facebook%20Video%20Blogs

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