By Donna Lu
With help from artificial intelligence, we can now detect patches of floating marine plastic from satellite data. The technique may eventually help environmental researchers better monitor and manage plastic waste in the ocean.
Lauren Biermann at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK, and her colleagues have devised an AI capable of identifying sea plastic in imagery taken at varying wavelengths of light. They trained it with images from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellites, which record visual information at …