The NOAA Fisheries Alaska Fisheries Science Center Marine Mammal Laboratory (MML) is mandated to monitor the endangered western Steller sea lion population in Alaska. MML conducts annual aerial surveys of known Steller sea lion sites across the southern Alaska coastline to capture visual imagery. It requires two full-time, independent counters to process overlapping imagery manually (to avoid double counting sea lions in multiple frames), and count and classify individuals by age and sex class. These counts are vital for population and ecosystem-based modeling to better understand the species and ecosystem, to inform sustainable fishery management decisions, and are eagerly anticipated by stakeholders like the NOAA Alaska Regional Office, industry, and environmental groups. MML worked with Kitware to develop detection and image registration pipelines with VIAME (updates to the DIVE program to support updated interface needs). MML is now working to assess the algorithms efficacy and develop a workflow to augment the traditional counting method (to RL 9)