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NOAA keeps track of many marine mammals, including seals that rely on floating ice for hunting, giving birth, or escaping predators. Surveying the populations of those creatures can be difficult and risky, especially in the remote Arctic. Now, NOAA is experimenting with unmanned aircraft systems (“drone” planes), sending them over the ice with high-resolution cameras. Help NOAA find the seals in the satellite images below.
You be the scientist
If you had to design a computer program to detect seals in aerial photos like the ones above, how would you do it?
[...] The Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences has created a game for middle school students from the aerial photographs. The students try to spot the seals in photographs from the project. You can play the game here. [...]
I would invert the image, convert white into black and enhance or colour the grey scale, in order to see the seals and other mammals.