Sustainable fisheries management is essential to the preservation of wild fish stocks, with seafood continuing to be one of the most diverse and versatile food group available. But seafood has the propensity to spoil at quicker rates than many other centerplate proteins.
Technology can be utilized to minimize waste and bycatch and at the same time maximize transparency and traceability, resulting in sustainable fishing practices, helping to monitor and estimate sustainable catch levels.
There is a strong need to modernize and continuously improve onboard fisheries technology in order to boost quality and value, while managing catch pressure for sustainability purposes. Fishing vessels need to handle large amounts of catch and process quickly to lock in freshness due to perishable nature of fish. Effective and fast onboard fish sorting is also important for accurate regulatory reporting to measure catches per species and control total allowable catches (TAC).
Current technologies for onboard grading, sorting and tracking fish are manual or semi-automatic and, therefore, suffer several technical limitations related to speed requirements, grading high number of species, variation of size and shape of each species, variation of the optical characteristics of each fish within seasons and harsh environment on board. This results in quality deterioration, fish discards as well as reduced profitability for fisheries players.
SEASCANN is integrated by a unique vision system that automatically grades fish by size, color, quality and species, benefitting from a cloud-based communication system that gathers and transfers real time data to fisheries and other stakeholders.
SEASCANN is the first onboard fish sorting machine on the market, which uses a vision unit to automatically grade fish based on size, color, quality and species – therefore offering the advantages of more efficiency and increased sorting accuracy, in addition to real-time information on the quantity and quality of the catch.
SEASCANN gives a descriptive information of each fish and other metadata and is the first highly effective sorting solution that operates onboard vessels offering real-time data.
The end users of SEASCANN can be categorized into four groups:
1. Fisheries firms.
2. Land operators and processing companies (first buyers of the catch supplied by the fishing vessels).
3. Research bodies, regulators and agencies (NGOs, independent bodies and government).
4. Fish inspectors and national authorities.
There is a need for increased economical sustainability in the fishing industry and SEASCANN will have a huge positive environmental and societal impact. Where it will provide European authorities the means to gather reliable and accurate fisheries-related data, collected by fishing fleets during fishing days, reducing the current expenditure.
