Applications of artificial intelligence technologies in water environments: From basic techniques to novel tiny machine learning systems

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are novel techniques to detect hidden patterns in environmental data. Despite their capabilities, these novel technologies have not been seriously used for real-world problems, such as real-time environmental monitoring. This survey established a framework to advance the novel applications of AI and ML techniques such as Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) in water environments. The survey covered deep learning models and their advantages over classical ML models. The deep learning algorithms are the heart of TinyML models and are of paramount importance for practical uses in water environments. This survey highlighted the capabilities and discussed the possible applications of the TinyML models in water environments. This study indicated that the TinyML models on microcontrollers are useful for a number of cutting-edge problems in water environments, especially for monitoring purposes. The TinyML models on microcontrollers allow for in situ real-time environmental monitoring without transferring data to the cloud. It is concluded that monitoring systems based on TinyML models offer cheap tools to autonomously track pollutants in water and can replace traditional monitoring methods.