Artificial intelligence from Lausanne discovers plastic waste in the sea
Published: Thursday, Nov 30th 2023, 10:40
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A new artificial intelligence (AI) from Lausanne recognizes plastic in the sea from satellite images. This could help to systematically rid the oceans of plastic waste using ships, the EPFL announced on Thursday.
The AI model developed by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and Wageningen University (NL) estimates the probability of the presence of waste for each pixel in satellite images, as explained by EPFL.
The accumulation of waste in the sea is visible on the freely available Sentinel-2 satellite images of the European Space Agency, but as this involves terabytes of data, this data must be analyzed automatically with the help of AI models.
The new AI is more successful than previous models, according to the EPFL. Even in difficult atmospheric conditions with clouds and haze, according to the EPFL. This is particularly important because plastics are often washed into open waters after rain. The researchers presented the AI to experts in the journal "Cell iScience".
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