CEFAS24-111 ITT for marine litter image annotation services for OCPP

Tender description

ITT for provision of marine litter image annotation services including working in-country, for multiple countries under the Ocean Country Partnership Programme (OCPP). The Ocean Country Partnership Programme (OCPP) is funded through official development assistance (ODA) as part of the UK’s £500 million Blue Planet Fund. Through the OCPP, the UK government partners with ODA-eligible countries to deliver tangible and positive impacts on the livelihoods of coastal communities that depend on healthy marine ecosystems. The programme supports countries to strengthen marine science expertise, develop science-based policy and management tools, and create educational resources for coastal communities. Marine litter is a growing threat to ecosystems and the livelihoods that depend on them, particularly in developing states whose economies are often dependent on sectors directly affected by litter. It is a complex and cross sector challenge, which is dependent on carefully targeted policy, informed by scientific environmental monitoring data. However, this monitoring requires significant human and financial resource, which can be particularly problematic in resource constrained states where competition for funding is intense. Consequently, states most vulnerable to the impacts of marine litter have incomplete or absent data to develop informed policy and secure buy-in from stakeholders. The OCPP is supporting partner countries to utilise the latest automation technologies to address scientific monitoring demands in resource constrained environments. OCPP also aims to break down growing digital divides between the global north and south by developing partner countries capacity to support environmental automation technology, in this case by providing the annotation and quality control part of the machine learning pipeline as a service alongside in country capacity development of the same process. Cefas require the Supplier to provide a marine litter annotation service on drone survey images of beaches for OCPP partners countries. These annotations will be used by Cefas and partners to train machine learning algorithm to automatically detect litter, analyse and report on marine litter. However, the high heterogeneity of litter items within classes (e.g. plastic drinking bottles), sometimes subtle differences between classes (plastic drinking bottles vs plastic cleaning bottles) and regional differences in litter generated (e.g. plastic drinking bags vs plastic drinking bottles) underline the need for large numbers of quality assured annotation data. Current OCPP countries which may be included in this Contract are: Belize, Ghana, Senegal, Bangladesh, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Madagascar, Mozambique, Vanuatu. The Contract will be awarded for completion of annotation on up to 50,000 images and is dependent on demand from OCPP partner countries. The Contract will be awarded for a maximum of £120,000 - however, please note that Cefas is unable to guarantee the volume or value of work that will be required within this maximum limit. ACCESS TO Cefas Marine Litter Photo Guide, schema and example images - if you are interested in bidding, please request access via the Message Centre function and you will be sent a zip file containing the supplementary files. These must be treated confidentially and must only be used for the purposes of writing and submitting your bid for this specific Invitation to Tender.