DeepLitterAI: Automated detection and quantification of deep-sea benthic plastic and macrolitter with field validation in waters around Japan.
Deep-sea imagery is a non-destructive tool for monitoring seafloor litter, but manual inspection limits its scalability. DeepLitterAI, a YOLOv11x-based detector combined with BoT-SORT tracking, was developed to automatically detect and quantify deep-sea benthic macrolitter. The model was trained with J-Litter, a datase...