The Taiwan Tuna Association has teamed up with the National Chung Cheng University to trial a video-monitoring system aboard its fishing vessels, aimed at stamping out labor abuses.
The TTA said it’s using a government grant to install the surveillance systems on its distant-water fishing vessels, allowing onshore monitoring and the use of blockchain to guarantee the validity of the captured data. The move comes as part of a three-year experimental project titled “Fulfilling the Protection of Human Rights at Sea and Supporting the Sustainable Development of Fisheries with Technology: Establishing Person-Centered Decent Labor Policies in Distant Water Fisheries.” The project is funded in part by Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology, which plans to set up a communication platform for stakeholders “utilizing advanced technologies, such as big data and blockchain,” according to the TTA.
TTA members participating in the scheme include well-known tuna suppliers Chun-I Fishery, Jinn Chun Fishery, and Hong Yuan Fishery.
TTA Project Leader Tony Lin told Seafoodsource that, thus far, his team has installed CCTV on five fishing boats, all of which have since left Taiwanese ports, with a further four vessels to be fitted soon.
“I expect to see the results of the experiment after the vessels return to the port in half-a-year,” he said.
According to Lin, a major goal of the project is to use biometrics (primarily facial recognition) to record and monitor working hours, while CCTV monitors and “human pose estimation” and “human behavior analysis and prediction” are used to identify labor abuses. The CCTV on decks and passageways will alert management when a “high-risk behavior” like violence is detected, and will track and predict abnormal conditions, Lin said. Blockchain technology will be used to set up a database to improve the transparency of the working environment at sea, theoretically allowing data to be trusted and analyzed by interested…
