from Hacker News

See a Fish? Ring the Bell

by cyanbane on 3/23/24, 3:34 PM with 79 comments

• by newaccount74 on 3/25/24, 5:50 PM

  This excerpt from the FAQ might be interesting:

  > We also want to show Utrecht’s residents and visitors how much life there is underwater in the canals. The doorbell also provides information on the species and numbers of fish travelling through Utrecht’s waterways. We can use that information to improve the quality of underwater life in Utrecht.

  Of course AI could do this without human intervention. They want the public to take part in this project.

• by rvanlaar on 3/25/24, 10:07 PM

  Never expected this from my hometown to hit hackernews.

  For some context, here's the lock in streetview: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.0974077,5.1152216,3a,75y,277...

• by dudeinjapan on 3/25/24, 7:06 PM

  People keep talking about training an AI to ring the doorbell but how about training the fish to do it themselves??

• by cool-RR on 3/25/24, 9:19 PM

  This might be the first actual livestream.

• by scoot on 3/25/24, 7:16 PM

  It looks like this was given a second chance by mods, and moved to the front page, as it was originally posted 2 days ago, not 3 hours (at the time of writing) [0].

  What's interesting is that it's the one with the editorialized title that has been rescued, despite this being against the HN guidelines.

  [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=visdeurbel.nl [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

• by dengxiaopeng on 3/25/24, 6:35 PM

  I used to work professionally in the US doing this sort of task with computer vision. The challenging part isn’t so much the labeling/classification of a fish within an image; instead, it’s a connection to cloud environments to do processing. Most of the projects I worked on were at hydroelectric dams, where-as an ironic punchline goes—it’s punishingly hard to get access to reliable power or water.

  If anyone is interested/curious happy to answer any questions on here or via DM.

• by taid9iK- on 3/24/24, 10:43 PM

  Finally, an application for AI that makes sense.

• by barbazoo on 3/25/24, 4:57 PM

  > Every spring, fish swim right through Utrecht, looking for a place to spawn and reproduce. Some swim all the way to Germany. There is a problem, however: they often have to wait a long time at the Weerdsluis lock on the west side of the inner city, as the lock rarely opens in spring. We have come up with a solution: the fish doorbell! An underwater camera has been set up at the lock, and the live feed is streamed to the homepage. If you see a fish, press the digital fish doorbell. The lock operator is sent a signal and can open the lock if there are enough fish. Now you can help fish make it through the canals of Utrecht.

  So unless there are people watching and alerting them (free labor) the fish don't get to procreate? That's a lot of responsibility.

  It's so nice that they found a way to offload the externalities of running a lock without having to spend any money themselves, let the public do it. A playful implementation of "privatize profits, socialize losses". Why pay someone to actually watch the feed and react when appropriate if they can gameify and let the people do it.

• by tnolet on 3/25/24, 8:10 PM

  Awesome, this is 50m from my office. Born and raised in Utrecht but had no idea.

• by tgtweak on 3/25/24, 8:08 PM

  Could this not be done with ai image recognition? Also it would be great to have an interactive timeline (like a ring or nest doorbell camera) that shows previous fish and gate openings and understand busy times of day and fish species.

  Edit: Someone said "why not train the fish to ring the doorbell" and that got me thinking - what if there were two chambers inter-connected with a gate - with relatively large openings on both ends like a pipe that a stream would flow through under a road... fish would swim into one side and a Sonar, IR or Conductivity sensor would know when there is something other than water in the chamber and instruct the sluice gate to open. That way the fish are opening it just by swimming in either side. It would close when nothing is detected in either chamber for a period of time. It would be the fish equivalent of walking up to an automatic sliding door at a shop.

  You can still record the fish traversing and display it interactively so that people are engaged, but it doesn't become reliant on it.

• by zzzeek on 3/25/24, 11:14 PM

  I see fast moving water and tons of bits of blurry things moving all about. are those fish? or debris? they could all be blurry black and white goldfish for all I know. What does a positive picture of "a fish" look like here?

• by kristopolous on 3/26/24, 12:41 AM

  It's worth pointing out one of the best youtube channels around, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

  https://www.youtube.com/@MBARIvideo

• by jbottoms on 3/26/24, 2:58 AM

  Norway has done work in this area that uses computers. Their system recognizes fish and parasites. As the fish pass through the systdm a laser zaps the parasites and antibiotics are not needed.

• by pentamassiv on 3/25/24, 7:22 PM

  Did anyone see a fish? I've been watching the livestream did not see any. Luckely they have a gallery with the best pictures.

  I wonder how deep the camera is. There is even a picture of a bird under the water

• by speedgoose on 3/25/24, 5:21 PM

  It could be an interesting research dataset. I wonder what’s the best method today. Perhaps a fine tuned YOLO model, or a CLIP searching for fish, or some simple OpenCV?

• by karaterobot on 3/25/24, 6:32 PM

  It seems like they're saying you ring the bell when you see a fish, and that notifies the lock operator, who probably checks the same camera to verify it, then opens the locks if certain conditions are met. So, the advantage is that the operator can do other things besides watching the camera all the time, knowing that helpful people on the internet will alert him when needed.

  Does that work in practice, especially after the site goes viral? I'd assume there would be a ton of false positives, i.e. people ringing the bell for the lulz.

  If it's just a fun community thing, and the alert actually goes to the equivalent of /dev/null, that that's fine. Maybe a better metaphor would be those buttons on cross-walks that aren't attached to anything, but make you feel like you're influencing the light sequence when you press them. Anyway, I just don't get how this would work well in practice.

• by FredPret on 3/25/24, 5:43 PM

  This is amazing. They should make a little ML-operated door in the lock for the fish so you don't have to open the whole lock manually

• by iefbr14 on 3/25/24, 10:38 PM

  Wouldnt it be handier if the door bell was placed under water so the fish can reach it?