The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT), known as artificial intelligence of things (AIoT), is driving significant advancements in the aquaculture industry, offering solutions to longstanding challenges related to operational efficiency, sustainability, and productivity. This review explores the latest research studies in AIoT within the aquaculture industry, focusing on real-time environmental monitoring, data-driven decision-making, and automation. IoT sensors deployed across aquaculture systems continuously track critical parameters such as temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, salinity, and fish behavior. AI algorithms process these data streams to provide predictive insights into water quality management, disease detection, species identification, biomass estimation, and optimized feeding strategies, among others. Much as AIoT adoption in aquaculture is advantageous on various fronts, there are still numerous challenges, including high implementation costs, data privacy concerns, and the need for scalable and adaptable AI models across diverse aquaculture environments. This review also highlights future directions for AIoT in aquaculture, emphasizing the potential for hybrid AI models, improved scalability for large-scale operations, and sustainable resource management.

Manual inspection and harvesting of ripening tomatoes is time consuming and labor intensive. Smart agriculture can emphasize the use of digital horticultural resources for farming and can increase farm sustainability; to that end, we proposed a fuzzy Mask R-CNN model to automatically identify the ripeness levels of cherry tomatoes. First, to annotate the images automatically, a fuzzy c-means model was used to maintain the spatial information of various foreground and background elements of the image. Then, a Hough transform method was applied to locate the specific geometric edge positions of the tomatoes. Each data point of the image space was annotated to a JavaScript Object Notation file. Second, annotated images were trained with Mask R-CNN to identify each tomato precisely. Finally, to prevent preharvest abscission of tomatoes, a hue–saturation–value color model and fuzzy inference rules were used to predict the ripeness of the tomatoes. A trigonometric function with Euclidian distance was calculated from the origin of calyx and stem to the bottom of the tomato to obtain the position of the pedicle head and dissect the fruit in a timely manner. For detection of 100 tomato images, Mask R-CNN achieved an accuracy of 98.00%. The ripeness classification of tomatoes achieved overall weighted precision and recall rates of 0.9614 and 0.9591, respectively. Thus, automatic tomato harvesting applications can empower farmers to make better decisions and enhance overall production efficiency and yield.

Birdwatching is a common hobby but to identify their species requires the assistance of bird books. To provide birdwatchers a handy tool to admire the beauty of birds, we developed a deep learning platform to assist users in recognizing 27 species of birds endemic to Taiwan using a mobile app named the Internet of Birds (IoB). Bird images were learned by a convolutional neural network (CNN) to localize prominent features in the images. First, we established and generated a bounded region of interest to refine the shapes and colors of the object granularities and subsequently balanced the distribution of bird species. Then, a skip connection method was used to linearly combine outputs of the previous and current layers to improve feature extraction. Finally, we applied the softmax function to obtain a probability distribution of bird features. The learned parameters of bird features were used to identify pictures uploaded by mobile users. The proposed CNN model with skip connections achieved higher accuracy of 99.00.

Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is a disease that can cause blindness in premature infants. It is characterized by immature vascular growth of the retinal blood vessels. However, early detection and treatment of ROP can significantly improve the visual acuity of high-risk patients. Thus, early diagnosis of ROP is crucial in preventing visual impairment. However, several patients refrain from treatment owing to the lack of medical expertise in diagnosing the disease; this is especially problematic considering that the number of ROP cases is on the rise. To this end, we applied transfer learning to five deep neural network architectures for identifying ROP in preterm infants. Our results showed that the VGG19 model outperformed the other models in determining whether a preterm infant has ROP, with 96% accuracy, 96.6% sensitivity, and 95.2% specificity. We also classified the severity of the disease; the VGG19 model showed 98.82% accuracy in predicting the severity of the disease with a sensitivity and specificity of 100% and 98.41%, respectively. We performed 5-fold cross-validation on the datasets to validate the reliability of the VGG19 model and found that the VGG19 model exhibited high accuracy in predicting ROP. These findings could help promote the development of computer-aided diagnosis.

Numerous bird species have become extinct because of anthropogenic activities and climate change. The destruction of habitats at a rapid pace is a significant threat to biodiversity worldwide. Thus, monitoring the distribution of species and identifying the elements that make up the biodiversity of a region are essential for designing conservation stratagems. However, identifying bird species from images is a complicated and tedious task owing to interclass similarities and fine-grained features. To overcome this, in this study, we developed a transfer learning-based method using Inception-ResNet-v2 to detect and classify bird species endemic to Taiwan and to distinguish them from other object domains. Furthermore, to validate the reliability of the model, we adopted a technique that involves swapping misclassified data between training and validation datasets. The swapped data are retrained until the most suitable result is obtained. Additionally, fivefold cross-validation was performed to verify the predictive performance of the model. The proposed model was tested using 760 images of birds belonging to 29 species that are endemic to Taiwan; the images were captured from various environments with different perspectives and occlusions. Our model achieved an accuracy of 98.39% in the classification of the bird species and 100% in the detection of birds among different object categories. Moreover, the model achieved a precision, recall, and F1-score of 98.49%, 97.50%, and 97.90%, respectively, in classifying bird species endemic to Taiwan.