Underwater mussel culture grounds: precision technologies for management purposes

The exploitation of offshore mussel farms is becoming relevant almost everywhere, even though it lags way behind other food sectors that are already supported by mature monitoring, modeling, prediction, and analysis tools. New technologies and sensors could indeed boost this sector and alleviate key challenges facing the aquaculture industry. However, experiences and usable solutions are still scarce. Here, we propose a first attempt to introduce Augmented Reality (AR) technologies - compositing real environments and simulated objects - to increase the human perception of a scene in real time and support the management of a mussel culture ground. The case study offshore farm, located in the central Adriatic Sea, is structured in submerged mussel long-lines and, partly, in innovative submerged fixed poles. Object detection in video with deep learning is used to geo-locate buoys in real time, while a multibeam echosounder allowed geo-referenced observations of the fixed mussel poles not otherwise visible by the onboard camera. The AR prototype supports farmers to accomplish their every-day offshore tasks and have real-time visual access to the whole farm and related geographical information system.