Funding decision for the project "Kiek Ma" handed over by Minister Dirk Schrödter

Husum,

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly important in the processing of large amounts of image data.

Eight people stand side by side in a room in front of a screen, the two people in the middle jointly hold a letter up to the camera.

Minister Dirk Schrödter hands over the funding decision for the "Kiek Ma" project to Dr. Georg Nehls and the team from BioConsult SH. l/r: Laura Knapwerth (BioConsult), Andreas Hennig, project manager KI-Transfer-Hub SH), Guruprasad Hegde and Anna Kersten (BioConsult), Minister Dirk Schrödter with Managing Director Dr. Georg Nehls, Monika Dorsch and Ansgar Diederichs (BioConsult).

BioConsult SH is also joining this development with the project "Kiek Ma - Artificial Intelligence for the Classification of Marine Species". Using AI, the evaluation of our digital aerial survey recordings of birds and marine mammals at sea shall be automated, in order to reduce time and costs of analyses and thus meet the requirements for fast data availability.

Automatic species identification particularly challenging due to high intra-species-specific variability, the resolution of the videos and the variable environmental conditions at sea. Therefore, the provision of large amounts of training data is even more important for a reliable classification. As BioConsult SH is conducting digital aerial surveys with the HiDef method in the past eight years, we have collected extensive amount of video material and are thus able to generate corresponding training data.

We are pleased that this innovative project is being funded by the state of Schleswig-Holstein as part of its AI strategy. On 16.09.2022, we had the pleasure of welcoming Minister Dirk Schrödter, Head of the State Chancellery, to hand over the funding decision. Thank you for the visit!