Visual analysis of complex fish habitats is an important step towards sustainable fisheries for human consumption and environmental protection. Deep Learning methods have shown great promise for scene analysis when trained on large-scale datasets. However, current datasets for fish analysis tend to focus on the classification task within constrained, plain environments which do not capture the complexity of underwater fish habitats. To address this limitation, we present DeepFish as a benchmark suite with a large-scale dataset to train and test methods for several computer vision tasks. The dataset consists of approximately 40 thousand images collected underwater from 20 habitats in the marine-environments of tropical Australia. The dataset originally contained only classification labels. Thus, we collected point-level and segmentation labels to have a more comprehensive fish analysis benchmark. These labels enable models to learn to automatically monitor fish count, identify their locations, and estimate their sizes. Our experiments provide an in-depth analysis of the dataset characteristics, and the performance evaluation of several state-of-the-art approaches based on our benchmark. Although models pre-trained on ImageNet have successfully performed on this benchmark, there is still room for improvement. Therefore, this benchmark serves as a testbed to motivate further development in this challenging domain of underwater computer vision.

Marine scientists use remote underwater image and video recording to survey fish species in their natural habitats. This helps them get a step closer towards understanding and predicting how fish respond to climate change, habitat degradation and fishing pressure. This information is essential for developing sustainable fisheries for human consumption, and for preserving the environment. However, the enormous volume of collected videos makes extracting useful information a daunting and time‐consuming task for a human being. A promising method to address this problem is the cutting‐edge deep learning (DL) technology. DL can help marine scientists parse large volumes of video promptly and efficiently, unlocking niche information that cannot be obtained using conventional manual monitoring methods. In this paper, we first provide a survey of computer visions (CVs) and DL studies conducted between 2003 and 2021 on fish classification in underwater habitats. We then give an overview of the key concepts of DL, while analysing and synthesizing DL studies. We also discuss the main challenges faced when developing DL for underwater image processing and propose approaches to address them. Finally, we provide insights into the marine habitat monitoring research domain and shed light on what the future of DL for underwater image processing may hold. This paper aims to inform marine scientists who would like to gain a high‐level understanding of essential DL concepts and survey state‐of‐the‐art DL‐based fish classification in their underwater habitat.

Approximately 2,500 weights and corresponding images of harvested Lates calcarifer (Asian seabass or barramundi) were collected at three different locations in Queensland, Australia. Two instances of the LinkNet-34 segmentation Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) were trained. The first one was trained on 200 manually segmented fish masks with excluded fins and tails. The second was trained on 100 whole-fish masks. The two CNNs were applied to the rest of the images and yielded automatically segmented masks. The one-factor and two-factor simple mathematical weight-from-area models were fitted on 1072 area-weight pairs from the first two locations, where area values were extracted from the automatically segmented masks. When applied to 1,400 test images (from the third location), the one-factor whole-fish mask model achieved the best mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), MAPE = 4.36%. Direct weight-from-image regression CNNs were also trained, where the no-fins based CNN performed best on the test images with MAPE = 4.28%.

Given a sufficiently large training dataset, it is relatively easy to train a modern convolution neural network (CNN) as a required image classifier. However, for the task of fish classification and/or fish detection, if a CNN was trained to detect or classify particular fish species in particular background habitats, the same CNN exhibits much lower accuracy when applied to new/unseen fish species and/or fish habitats. Therefore, in practice, the CNN needs to be continuously fine-tuned to improve its classification accuracy to handle new project-specific fish species or habitats. In this work we present a labelling-efficient method of training a CNN-based fish-detector (the Xception CNN was used as the base) on relatively small numbers (4,000) of project-domain underwater fish/no-fish images from 20 different habitats. Additionally, 17,000 of known negative (that is, missing fish) general-domain (VOC2012) above-water images were used. Two publicly available fish-domain datasets supplied additional 27,000 of above-water and underwater positive/fish images. By using this multi-domain collection of images, the trained Xception-based binary (fish/not-fish) classifier achieved 0.17% false-positives and 0.61% false-negatives on the project’s 20,000 negative and 16,000 positive holdout test images, respectively. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) was 99.94%.