PowerPoint: Open Source Software Platform for Electronic Monitoring
Sea State Inc. has developed a suite of software applications to support commercial fisheries electronic monitoring (EM) data acquisition, review, summarization and archival. This National Fish and Wildlife Foundation funded project, in partnership with Saltwater Inc. and Chordata LLC, provides a platform that is adaptable to marine fisheries nationwide. The source code is available under the Gnu Public License, ensuring that all future enhancements will be open source as well.
The shipboard component of the software works on a wide range of hardware: from simple data-loggers without cameras up to systems with eight or more cameras. It is designed for flexibility – system behavior is controlled by configuration rules based on data from GPS, hydraulic pressure, reel rotation and video analytics. It supports the Open Network Video Interface Forum specification so as to allow resolution and framerate changes at sea, and to improve interoperability with IP cameras from many different vendors.
The review component is template driven, allowing it to be easily adapted to a wide range of data collection protocols. Long term data storage can be a significant cost driver for EM programs, so the platform also provides sophisticated archival capabilities: image extraction, subsampling, and selective deletion of video data.
