Project: CORaiL

2020: Project presentation: CORaiL

On April 22, 2020 the Accenture company, Intel corporation and Sulubaii Environmental Foundation fund provided Project: CORaiL is the solution based on artificial intelligence (AI) for monitoring, reconstruction and recovery of coral reeves. Project: CORaiL was unrolled in May, 2019 on the reef surrounding the island of Pangatalan on Philippines. It allowed researchers to collect in total about 40,000 images which were used for reef status assessment in real time.

Project initiative: CORaiL is an example of how the artificial intelligence and modern technologies are capable to help researchers with monitoring and recovery of coral reeves. We very much are proud of our partnership with Accenture and Sulubaii Environmental Foundation in implementation of this important initiative directed to protection of our planet – Rose Schooler, the corporate vice president of Intel for sales and marketing speaks

Coral reeves are one of the most various ecosystems in the world where more than 800 types of corals form the habitat and a shelter approximately for 25% of all sea flora and fauna. Coral reeves are useful and for people – they help to protect coastlines from tropical storm, provide with food and income about one billion people and annually bring 9.6 billion dollars in the industry of tourism and rest. However, according to the program of the UN in the field of environment protection, today coral reeves are under the threat of disappearance, their status quickly worsens because of excessive catch of fish, ground trawling, increase in water temperature and absence steady the practician at development of a coastal zone.

The artificial intelligence opens unprecedented opportunities for the solution of some most burning issues of mankind. Our ecosystem of corporate and social partners within this project using artificial intelligence for public benefit shows that by what more participants are involved in this work, we can render bigger effect to those on the environment, – Jason Mitchell, the managing director of Accenture speaks

The quantity and a variety of fishes serve as an important indicator of shared state of a reef. Traditional efforts on monitoring of coral reeves assume participation of divers, manually leading photo and video filming of a reef. It can be destructive for sea life as divers can inadvertently frighten fish, forcing it to hide not to mention that under water for shootings of a photo and video it is possible to be only 30 minutes.

Engineers from Accenture, Sulubaii and Intel started Project: CORaiL to recreate and add the damaged reef on Philippines. First, they built the concrete underwater platform developed by Sulubaii to support unstable fragments of corals. Construction under the name Sulu-Reef Prosthesis includes parts of live corals which will grow and develop, forming the hybrid habitat for fishes, sea flora and fauna. Besides, they installed intelligent underwater video cameras with the Accenture Applied Intelligence Video Analytics Services (VASP) platform to detect and photograph the fishes floating by. The VASP platform uses artificial intelligence for calculation and classification of sea inhabitants then collected data go to a land panel of monitoring, providing to researchers analytical data and information on dynamics of changes in real time that allows them to make the weighed decisions based on data.

The Accenture VASP platform is constructed based on processors Intel Xeon, programmable accelerators of Intel FPGA, machine vision the Intel processor Movidius and the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO tools.

Engineers work already on the next version of Project: CORaiL which will include the optimized convolution neural network and reserve power capability. They also study possibilities of infrared cameras which allow to shoot video at night thanks to what scientists will be able to create the broad picture of a coral ecosystem. Among other things the solution will allow to study the speed of migration of tropical fishes in colder waters and also to monitor invasions into underwater zones, protected or forbidden for swimming.