The Canadian Food Innovation Network announced this week that it is awarding $386,078 across four food-tech projects throughout the country, including one project that is based in British Columbia.
The capital hails from CFIN through the organization’s Innovation Booster Program.
Industry will match these funds to create projects valued at $772,154, according to CFIN.
The B.C. project, “Automating Seafood Inspection with Computer Vision Technology,” is being led by local upstart ThisFish.
The project looks to leverage ThisFish’s flagship product, dubbed TallyFish.
TallyFish, unveiled at last year’s Seafood Expo North America in Boston, uses smart cameras and computer vision to automatically inspect seafood in processing plants.
“Quality control typically involves selecting random fish samples and visually inspecting them for defects,” Eric Enno Tamm, cofounder of ThisFish, explained in 2023. “It’s a slow, manual process prone to human error and bias.”
With TallyVision, water-proof camera captures images of fish fillets passing on a conveyor belt; then, a machine-learning algorithm counts and measures the fillets, classifies their colour, and identifies different types of quality defects. Data is visualized via an analytics platform that displays graphs, charts, and dynamic reports.
The Innovation Booster project aims to integrate TallyVision into sorting and grading equipment and to develop new computer vision models to estimate fish or fillet weights from images, classify salmon fillet colors, and identify new species, according to a statement from CFIN.
The end goal of the project is “to use advanced computer vision to improve inspection accuracy and consistency, while automating sorting to reduce labor costs in seafood factories,” the organization says.
ThisFish received $99,000 from CFIN’s Booster.
In 2021, ThisFish won seed research funding from the Aquaculture Innovation Award.
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