A Waterloo Engineering team from the Vision and Image Processing (VIP) Lab is working with the Inuit-driven Arctic Eider Society (AES) to use deep learning to detect hazardous ice areas.
Led by Neil Brubacher (BASc ‘21 and MASc ‘24, systems design engineering), the team partnered with AES to add data about ice conditions to an app used by locals in Nunavut.
Warming temperatures mean shorter ice seasons for Inuit in Sanikiluaq, Nunavut. Small polynyas, where ocean currents, wind, or other processes prevent ice from forming, can be very dangerous and must be spotted before traveling. While polynyas are found in similar places yearly, climate change makes information about increasingly unpredictable ice conditions more important than ever.
To work towards sharing accurate and timely data on where polynyas are located and make ice travel safer, AES began working with the VIP Lab. Using data validated by local Inuit, the lab is developing machine learning models to identify potentially hazardous open-water areas in landfast sea ice using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. The output of these models will be combined with local knowledge and recent observations of ice conditions on SIKU: the Indigenous Knowledge Social Network (SIKU) and web platform, a community-driven platform.
After two years of working on the project, Brubacher had the opportunity to travel to Sanikiluaq this January and discuss the research with the community.
“It was an incredible depth of knowledge around sea ice, weather, and travel safety practices that I was very privileged to experience and listen in on,” he says. “It provided an important context to the local knowledge that these new tech systems are interfacing with.”
The developed polynya detection models will be potentially expanded to other coastal communities across the Arctic, and that they are continuing to investigate ways to combine machine learning and local knowledge to create the most effective community-driven information products.
Read combining Indigenous knowledge and AI to support safer on-ice travel for the full story.