B-FLOWS: Biofouling Focused Learning and Observation for Wide-Area Surveillance in Tidal Stream Turbines

Biofouling, the accumulation of marine organisms on submerged surfaces, presents significant operational challenges across various marine industries. Traditional detection methods are labor intensive and costly, necessitating the development of automated systems for efficient monitoring. The study presented in this paper focuses on detecting biofouling on tidal stream turbine blades using camera-based monitoring. The process begins with dividing the video into a series of images, which are then annotated to identify and select the bounding boxes containing objects to be detected. These annotated images are used to train YOLO version 8 to detect biofouled and clean blades in the images. The proposed approach is evaluated using metrics that demonstrate the superiority of this YOLO version compared to previous ones. To address the issue of misdetection, a data augmentation approach is proposed and tested across different YOLO versions, showing its effectiveness in improving detection quality and robustness.