Design and fabrication of a stereo-video camera equipped unoccupied aerial vehicle for measuring sea turtles, sharks, and other marine fauna

by Susan E. H. Piacenza, Joseph R. Piacenza, Kenneth J. Faller II, Nathan J. Robinson, Tabitha R. Siegfried

The recent commercialization of unoccupied aerial vehicles (UAVs) has facilitated their incorporation into a variety of ecological studies. While UAVs are able to provide accurate visual data of marine species from an aerial perspective, these devices have some limitations that make measuring marine animals below the surface challenging. Many marine organisms are often visible from the air, but are deeper in the water column, and current methods cannot measure animals below the surface. Here, we developed and tested a stereo-video camera (SVC) system that was mounted onto a commercially-available UAV. We used the SVC-UAV to conduct remote body-size measurements for two marine species: the green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas) and the nurse shark (Ginglymostoma cirratum). When comparing SVC measurements to those taken by hand, the SVC-UAV had a mean absolute error (MAE) of 4.44 cm (n = 6; mean percent error (MPE) = 10.6%) for green sea turtles and 7.16 cm absolute error (n = 1; PE = 3.6%) for the nurse shark. Using a linear model, we estimated the slope of the SVC versus hand measurements for green sea turtles to be 1.085 (±0.099 SE), and accounting for the standard error, a measurement bias was not apparent. Using model selection, based on a global model predicting MAE from animal distance to the SVC and body size, the top ranked model was the intercept-only model. This indicates that neither animal distance nor body size strongly influenced measurement error. Incorporating SVC systems into UAVs can allow for relatively accurate measurements of near surface-dwelling marine species. To our knowledge, there is no other stand-alone SVC for UAVs available that offers similar accuracy and utility.