Existnt Tech

The VisdeurBot

The VisdeurBot is an AI image-recognition system designed to identify different species of fish which are commonly found in the Weerdsluis lock canal in Utrecht, which lies upon a major migratory path for several species of European fish. To prevent the predation of fish waiting for the locks to open, the town has created the fish doorbell ("visdeurbel" in Dutch) project where people can watch a live feed of cameras at the locks, and notify a lock-keeper if fish are present so that the locks can be opened. The data for the project can be found at the GitHub page, along with the released AI models.

A photo from a security camera-style video feed. The head of a pike can be seen in the bottom-left corner. — A photo of a snoek (pike) at the lock canal.

My original idea with this project was for the system to be able to detect fish in real-time from the video feed from the Visdeurbel website, but I started the project in August, and the feed is only accessible during the migratory season, usually from early March to late May. For this reason, until next spring the system only detects fish from local video or image files. You can see the detection system running in the GIFs below:

A GIF containing several clips of fish swimming around, with the AI system's detection overlaid on the frames.

To download this model to run it yourself, the files and instructions can all be found on the GitHub page. A video explanation and demonstration of the model can be found below (you may have to detach the video to hear the audio):

While marked as "completed", this project is still in active development, as I hope to be able to add two key features to the AI. The first of these features would be enabling the system to access the Visdeurbel live feed, and the second is adding a way to notify a lock-keeper, through an LED, notification or something similar so that the AI would be able to essentially manage the doorbell itself.