#usnavy

#usnavy

AI Spots Shipwrecks From the Ocean's Surface and the Air with 92% AccuracyFinding shipwrecks may sound like stuff of movies, but it's an important part of naval research by the Navy. They're interested in finding shipwrecks that may help shed light on human history, including trade, migration and war.Unlike the movies, finding shipwrecks usually don't involve a map with a bloody X marking the location of the bounty - but science has the next best thing: sonar and lidar imageries of the seafloor.Leila Character of The University of Texas at Austin and colleagues, in collaboration with the United States Navy's Underwater Archaeology Branch, has used a machine learning artificial intelligence to spot shipwrecks off the coast of mainland USA and Puerto Rico.Character wrote in The Conversation:The first step in creating the shipwreck model was to teach the computer what a shipwreck looks like. It was also important to teach the computer how to tell the difference between wrecks and the topography of the seafloor. To do this, I needed lots of examples of shipwrecks. I also needed to teach the model what the natural ocean floor looks like.Conveniently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps a public database of shipwrecks. It also has a large public database of different types of imagery collected from around the world, including sonar and lidar imagery of the seafloor. The imagery I used extends to a little over 14 miles (23 kilometers) from the coast and to a depth of 279 feet (85 meters). This imagery contains huge areas with no shipwrecks, as well as the occasional shipwreck.Character's computer model has an accuracy of 92% and she now hopes to extend the model to spot shipwrecks from around the world.#shipwreck #sonar #lidar #seabed #oceanfloor #archaeology #underwaterarchaeology #USNavy #artificialintelligence #AI #machinelearningImage: Shipwrecks off the coast of Washington at the depth of 25m. Character L, et al. (2021) Remote Sens. 13(9) 1759.

Shock Trials on US Navy Aircraft Carrier Used 40,000 lb of ExplosivesOn Friday, the US Navy used 40,000 lb (18,000 kg) of explosives as shock trials of its newest aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R Ford. The blast was so huge that it registered as a 3.9 magnitude earthquake 100 miles away!From USNI News:“The first-in-class aircraft carrier was designed using advanced computer modeling methods, testing, and analysis to ensure the ship is hardened to withstand battle conditions, and these shock trials provide data used in validating the shock hardness of the ship,” the service said in a Saturday statement.Ford commanding officer Capt. Paul Lanzilotta told USNI News in March aboard the carrier that the crew had been busy preparing for the event.“That’s quite a bit of work when you have a ship with 5,000 spaces in it, so we have to prepare all of our gear,” he said.“We’re also going to prepare the crew: so the crew has to know what to expect, they need to practice their damage control procedures because that’s something that we all need to be good at, and when we shock the ship we need to make sure that we have the ship in as ready a condition as we can.”