Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGDPreserving nature and the environment in a healthy state is of immense importance to us all. Based on the Red List of endangered species, the sea trout population had become so threatened that, between 1992 and 1999, renaturation programs were required to repopulate certain regions.
Sea trout (Salmo trutta) belong to the group of “anadromous fish,” which means that they migrate from the sea into freshwater to spawn. However, in many places their passage is blocked by dams or weirs. As a result, sea trout have already been eradicated from many rivers.
To monitor sea trout populations, environmental institutes in Europe currently use methods such as counting with electrofishing devices or netting from a reference body of water. These methods are labor-intensive, locally restricted, and sometimes dangerous for the population itself.
As part of our pilot project, environmental institutes built bottlenecks along rivers that sea trout must pass through, in order to observe them with video cameras. However, analyzing the footage is still a labor-intensive process: a single staff member would need 5,664 hours to review the more than 1,360,000 videos recorded over the course of five months at all bottlenecks.
