GenWhales – Generative AI to Support Satellite-Based North Atlantic Right Whales (NARW) Detection
Client:
AltaML
Location:
Canada
Dates:
February 2025 – Ongoing
Background:
Whales and other large marine mammals play an important role in our ocean ecosystems but are threatened by climate change, entanglement in fishing gear, and vessel strikes. There are significant efforts to help conserve and monitor North Atlantic Right Whales (NARW), belugas, blue whales, and orcas in Canadian waters.
Through the Canadian Space Agency’s funding opportunity, smartWhales, Hatfield worked with collaborators to develop the smartWhales Space-based Detection System (SBDS) to automate whale detection from very high-resolution (VHR) satellite Earth observation (EO) imagery using deep learning models. The challenge to further advance and improve species-level detection with the SBDS is a lack of diverse satellite training data.
The goal of the GenWhales project is to use innovative methods through Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) to generate synthetic satellite images of NARW in aquatic environments to address the challenge of data scarcity to improve species-level detection. This approach pioneers GenAI Models made possible by recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RL-HF), to provide a cost-effective path forward of improving the identification and preservation of North Atlantic Right Whales (NARW) and other species found in Canadian waters.
Services Provided:
Hatfield is supporting AltaML, project lead, with the objective to integrate the GenWhales technology into the smartWhales SBDS to advance and improve its performance. In addition to assisting in the integration and evaluation of the GenWhales outputs into the SBDS, Hatfield will work closely with AltaML to provide specialized support in data needs assessments, data collection and processing, and guidance in GenAI experimentation and demonstration.
This project is undertaken with the financial support from the Canadian Space Agency under the smartEarth initiative.
Photo attribution: University of New Brunswick, Gina Lonati 2022
Photo caption: Drone images of North Atlantic Right Whales like this one are used by GenWhales to create synthetic satellite image examples of whales.
