Dutkat: A Multimedia System for Catching Illegal Catchers in a Privacy-Preserving Manner

Fish crime is considered a global and serious problem for a healthy and sustainable development of one of mankind's important sources of food. Technological surveillance and control solutions are emerging as remedies to combat criminal activities, but such solutions might also come with impractical and negative side-effects and challenges. In this paper, we present the concept and design of a surveillance system in lieu of current surveillance trends striking a delicate balance between privacy of legal actors while simultaneously capturing evidence-based footage, sensory data, and forensic proofs of illicit activities. Our proposed novel approach is to assist human operators in the 24/7 surveillance loop of remote professional fishing activities with a privacy-preserving Artificial Intelligence (AI) surveillance system operating in the same proximity as the activities being surveyed. The system will primarily be using video surveillance data, but also other sensor data captured on the fishing vessel. Additionally, the system correlates with other sources such as reports from other fish catches in the approximate area and time, etc. Only upon true positive flagging of specific potentially illicit activities by the locally executing AI algorithms, can forensic evidence be accessed from this physical edge, the fishing vessel. Besides a more privacy-preserving solution, our edge-based AI system also benefits from much less data that has to be transferred over unreliable, low-bandwidth satellite-based networks.