Fish Detection Using Deep Learning

Recently, human being’s curiosity has been expanded from the land to the sky and the sea. Besides sending people to explore the ocean and outer space, robots are designed for some tasks dangerous for living creatures. Take the ocean exploration for an example. There are many projects or competitions on the design of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) which attracted many interests. Authors of this article have learned the necessity of platform upgrade from a previous AUV design project, and would like to share the experience of one task extension in the area of fish detection. Because most of the embedded systems have been improved by fast growing computing and sensing technologies, which makes them possible to incorporate more and more complicated algorithms. In an AUV, after acquiring surrounding information from sensors, how to perceive and analyse corresponding information for better judgement is one of the challenges. The processing procedure can mimic human being’s learning routines. An advanced system with more computing power can facilitate deep learning feature, which exploit many neural network algorithms to simulate human brains. In this paper, a convolutional neural network (CNN) based fish detection method was proposed. The training data set was collected from the Gulf of Mexico by a digital camera. To fit into this unique need, three optimization approaches were applied to the CNN: data augmentation, network simplification, and training process speed up. Data augmentation transformation provided more learning samples; the network was simplified to accommodate the artificial neural network; the training process speed up is introduced to make the training process more time efficient. Experimental results showed that the proposed model is promising, and has the potential to be extended to other underwear objects.