Artificial intelligence helps detect plastic waste in sea

GENEVA

An artificial intelligence (AI) developed by a Swiss technology institute and a Dutch university uses satellite imagery to detect plastic in the ocean.

The new technology, developed by Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and Wageningen University in the Netherlands, could help to systematically remove plastic waste from the oceans using ships, the Dutch university announced in a press release on Thursday.

The newly developed AI estimates the probability of the presence of waste for each pixel in satellite images, according to the statement.

It also said that although the accumulation of waste in the sea is visible on the freely available Sentinel-2 satellite images from the European Space Agency, it requires the help of AI for the analysis, as it involves terabytes of data.

According to the developers of the AI, the new technology solves the task more successfully than previous models. One of the reasons for this is that it can detect the plastic even in difficult atmospheric conditions with clouds and haze.

This is particularly important as plastics are often washed into open waters after rain. According to estimates by World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), an environmental organization, from 2020, 4.8 to 12.7 million tons of plastic find their way into the oceans every year.

Only a small proportion of the plastic waste floats on the surface, the rest is transported to deeper waters or the seabed and is almost impossible to retrieve. According to the WWF, it is estimated that around 80 million tons have accumulated there.