CEFAS23-100 Contract for Ghanaian image annotation of marine litter images under the Ocean Country Partnership Programme (OCPP)

The Ocean Country Partnership Programme (OCPP) was announced in 2021 as a key bilateral aid programme under the £500m Blue Planet Fund.

OCPP objectives are to support countries to tackle marine pollution, support sustainable seafood practices and establish designated, well-managed and enforced Marine Protected Areas (MPAs).

The overall aim of this project is to produce a machine learning algorithm capable of identifying at least 89 marine litter items as defined by international protocols. The main output of this work will therefore be one of the largest and most detailed databases of high-quality annotated images of marine litter in the world.

The supplier will annotate approximately 7,000 images, collected from 8 beaches along the Ghanaian coast during the wet and dry season. The supplier will use a photo guide provided to them by Cefas, which will contain example images for the 89 litter categories. In addition, the supplier will assist Cefas to perform inter-rater assessments at the beginning, middle and end of the contract to better understand human error in litter annotations.