A groundbreaking conservation-focused fish recognition app being designed through collaboration between researchers and government in Hong Kong will be ready in early 2021.
The app is aimed at monitoring the illegal trade in reef fish like Napoleon wrasse – protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) – into the city’s dining and market sectors.
“We now have funding from Ocean Park Conservation Fund to complete the work,” said Yvonne Sadovy de Mitcheson, a professor at the Swire Institute of Marine Science at the University of Hong Kong, which is working with the Hong Kong government to help improve enforcement using facial recognition for the endangered CITES-listed fish.
The facial recognition app, called “Saving Face,” was developed by Corvidae, a company that originated as a start up at Hong Kong University.
“The programmer from Corvidae has much improved the software and we now have a 'similarity index' comparing a new photo with a stored photo, which provides an absolute indication of the match, compared to an indication only judged relative to other images in the database,” Sadovy told SeafoodSource. “This is a big advance. He is completing work on this and also reducing the size of the package to fit better into a mobile phone format.”
The project is also getting input on the mobile app from another young company, Clear Robotics, based at the iDendron start-up section at Hong Kong University.
“We hope to roll out both the phone app and two versions of the software, one for government enforcement use and one for public use by early part of 2021,” Sadovy said.
The local CITES office, based in the Hong Kong government Agriculture Fisheries & Conservation Department (AFCD), is committed to use it for enforcement here in Hong Kong, “particularly in the retail sector,” explained Sadovy.
“The CITES office has already trialled the app in local markets, resulting in detection and prosecutions,” she said. “We are in regular contact about their data-management needs for enforcement which are in some ways different from the public-faced app we are working on. For example, AFCD needs an offline version of the app for which they will dedicate a computer and mobile phones. On the other hand, the public version of the app – you could think of it as citizen science – will be cloud-based and Microsoft has already donated one year of this for us for the project. So we have two modifications of the app for these two user groups.”
As for promoting the app among consumers, Sadovy said the effort will begin on Facebook and expand from there.
“We know that members of the public can be interested in this fish from reports that we have received of fish on sale and possibly illegal ones, sent to our Facebook page 'HumpheadWrasseWatch,’ since this started several years ago,” she said. “We are now starting to update the Facebook work again and planning a campaign when the app is released.”
Photo courtesy of Tatiana Belova/Shutterstock
