EM Literature Review: Challenges to Implementing a Camera Based System to Support Catch Estimation in the North Pacific

Evolution of new technology is built upon past successes. National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (Council) are on a path to integrate electronic monitoring (EM) into the North Pacific fisheries monitoring program. Council’s objective is to deploy on-board camera systems that support catch estimation in a multi-species fisheries.

A literature review of EM studies was conducted to document past achievements and challenges to inform development of technologies and guide implementation. Of the 61 EM studies reviewed, 12 were  designed to evaluate the efficacy of EM to support catch estimation for multi species (5 studies) and single species (7 studies). These studies indicate that species count data are reliable when species are not similar in appearance, are not small and video quality is high. Studies attempting to monitor weights (inferred from length) of discard by species found reliability of length acquisition was dependent on catch handling practices, image quality and fish size. To address these issues, a camera system developed at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center provides the ability to collect high quality (HD) stereo images of catch events for efficient identification of fish to species or species group and automatically collect precise length measurements.