Award Data

"Rising sea levels and king tide flooding in coastal areas across America are saturating onsite wastewater disposal systems (OSDS), resulting in the degradation of coastal ecosystems and 200,000+ illnesses annually. Many States are mandating system upgrades, with 88,000 upgrades required by 2050 in Hawaii alone. Unfortunately, existing upgrade options are unaffordable for 97% of Hawaiian homeowner ...

Monitoring modern-day fisheries is extremely challenging. Every day, millions of vessels harvest the oceans, and many remain unregulated, putting target and non-target fish populations at risk of overexploitation and collapse. To combat this, fisheries managers are increasingly turning to Electronic Monitoring (EM) technologies – integrated systems of cameras and sensors – to record onboard ac ...

Rip currents cause multiple drowning deaths each year as swimmers are often unaware of the location and strength of coastal currents. Currently, ocean safety officials do not have an affordable and reliable commercial system which can measure coastal currents. The goal of this Phase I study is to test a stereo camera system to measure the speed, direction, and location of alongshore currents and ...

In 2017 the CDC estimated 35,000 American got sick from Vibrio parahaemolyticus transmitted by shellfish--a 54% increase. However, according to the co-chair of the Interstate Shellfish Sanitation Commission, “Our current system of traceback is inadequate.... Records are lost. Handwriting is illegible. More than half of all traceback investigations fail because the information in the value chain ...

The gray whale migration generates many hours of video that must be examined carefully to identify passing whales and get an accurate count of their numbers. Unfortunately, humans lack the necessary attention span. To solve this problem, a detector will be developed that can process hours of video, detecting whale blows while minimizing false positives and negatives. With an accurate record of ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Bottom Feeder will be a highly maneuverable Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), with a tethered operations option and modular sensor bay, to support benthic optical surveys, coral reef mapping and health assessment, and be expandable for future survey operations. It will integrate a low drag hullform, a minimum of four degrees of independent motion control, a highly efficient ...

Commercial marine aquaculture operators face many operational hazards including disease, predators, husbandry operations, and environmental changes. Most of theses risks are only identified with constant surveillance and physical presence at a farm site. However, human observation of risk factors is expensive, slow, and sometimes ineffective. Sensors are available to monitor individual environment ...

Oceanit proposes the design, construction, and testing of a hyperspectral imaging equipped Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) for the detection of various coral species and the monitoring of coral health. This system will be the prototype for the sensor part of a robust, COTS-based UAS system to aid the NOAA National Coral Reef Monitoring Program. Different coral families and species will be identified ...

We propose an innovative yet straightforward approach to developing and delivering a readily deployable product to support combating IUU. We combine newly available low-cost hyperspectral sensors with state-of-the-art deep learning-based real-time data processing and deploy it on high-availability commodity cloud computing hardware - our solution is compatible with both existing systems as well as ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: The objective of this project is to develop and implement a real-time detection and warning system to mitigate marine entanglement events in offshore aquaculture operations. In order to achieve this, we leverage the latest advances in computer vision, deep learning, and real-time object detection to develop a real-time marine life detection, classification and tracking pipeline ...