Oceans are the essential lifeblood of the Earth: they provide over 70% of the oxygen and over 97% of the water. Plankton and corals are two of the most fundamental components of ocean ecosystems, the former due to their function at many levels of the oceans food chain, the latter because they provide spawning and nursery grounds to many fish populations. Studying and monitoring plankton distribution and coral reefs is vital for environment protection. In the last years there has been a massive proliferation of digital imagery for the monitoring of underwater ecosystems and much research is concentrated on the automated recognition of plankton and corals. In this paper, we present a study about an automated system for monitoring of underwater ecosystems. The system here proposed is based on the fusion of different deep learning methods. We study how to create an ensemble based of different CNN models, fine tuned on several datasets with the aim of exploiting their diversity. The aim of our study is to experiment the possibility of fine-tuning pretrained CNN for underwater imagery analysis, the opportunity of using different datasets for pretraining models, the possibility to design an ensemble using the same architecture with small variations in the training procedure. The experimental results are very encouraging, our experiments performed on 5 well-knowns datasets (3 plankton and 2 coral datasets) show that the fusion of such different CNN models in a heterogeneous ensemble grants a substantial performance improvement with respect to other state-of-the-art approaches in all the tested problems. One of the main contributions of this work is a wide experimental evaluation of famous CNN architectures to report performance of both single CNN and ensemble of CNNs in different problems. Moreover, we show how to create an ensemble which improves the performance of the best single model.
Scripps Institution of Oceanography（斯克里普斯海洋研究所）；University of California - San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution（伍兹霍尔海洋研究所）
Planktonic organisms are of fundamental importance to marine ecosystems: they form the basis of the food web, provide the link between the atmosphere and the deep ocean, and influence global-scale biogeochemical cycles. Scientists are increasingly using imaging-based technologies to study these creatures in their natural habit. Images from such systems provide an unique opportunity to model and understand plankton ecosystems, but the collected datasets can be enormous. The Imaging FlowCytobot (IFCB) at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, for example, is an \emph{in situ} system that has been…
University of Granada（格拉纳达大学）；Technical University of Denmark (DTU)（丹麦技术大学）；Virginia Commonwealth University（弗吉尼亚联邦大学）
The recognition of coral species based on underwater texture images pose a significant difficulty for machine learning algorithms, due to the three following challenges embedded in the nature of this data: 1) datasets do not include information about the global structure of the coral; 2) several species of coral have very similar characteristics; and 3) defining the spatial borders between classes is difficult as many corals tend to appear together in groups. For this reason, the classification of coral species has always required an aid from a domain expert. The objective of this paper is to …
Centre Universitaire Condorcet（孔多塞大学中心）；University of Burgundy（勃艮第大学）；University of Girona（赫罗纳大学）；Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞瓦特大学）
Autonomous repair of deep-sea coral reefs is a recent proposed idea to support the oceans ecosystem in which is vital for commercial fishing, tourism and other species. This idea can be operated through using many small autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and swarm intelligence techniques to locate and replace chunks of coral which have been broken off, thus enabling re-growth and maintaining the habitat. The aim of this project is developing machine vision algorithms to enable an underwater robot to locate a coral reef and a chunk of coral on the seabed and prompt the robot to pick it up. A…
Plankton are effective indicators of environmental change and ecosystem health in freshwater habitats, but collection of plankton data using manual microscopic methods is extremely labor-intensive and expensive. Automated plankton imaging offers a promising way forward to monitor plankton communities with high frequency and accuracy in real-time. Yet, manual annotation of millions of images proposes a serious challenge to taxonomists. Deep learning classifiers have been successfully applied in various fields and provided encouraging results when used to categorize marine plankton images. Here,…
Multi-label classification for multi-temporal, multi-spatial coral reef condition monitoring using vision foundation model with adapter learning
Department of Socio-Cultural Environmental Studies, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo（社会文化环境研究部门，前沿科学研究生院，东京大学）；Department of Environment Systems, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo（环境系统部门，前沿科学研究生院，东京大学）；New Heaven Reef Conservation Program, Koh Tao, Surat Thani, 84360, Thailand（新天堂珊瑚礁保护计划， Koh Tao, Surat Thani, 84360, Thailand）；Data Science and AI Innovation Research Promotion Center, Shiga University（数据科学与人工智能创新研究促进中心，Shiga大学）；Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, The University of Tokyo（跨学际信息研究倡议，东京大学）
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；University of Montreal（蒙特利尔大学）；Blue Lion Labs（蓝狮实验室）
Creating high-performance generalizable deep neural networks for phytoplankton monitoring requires utilizing large-scale data coming from diverse global water sources. A major challenge to training such networks lies in data privacy, where data collected at different facilities are often restricted from being transferred to a centralized location. A promising approach to overcome this challenge is federated learning, where training is done at site level on local data, and only the model parameters are exchanged over the network to generate a global model. In this study, we explore the feasibil…
In this paper, we propose a new approach called Deep LogCORAL for unsupervised visual domain adaptation. Our work builds on the recently proposed Deep CORAL method, which proposed to train a convolutional neural network and simultaneously minimize the Euclidean distance of convariance matrices between the source and target domains. We propose to use the Riemannian distance, approximated by Log-Euclidean distance, to replace the naive Euclidean distance in Deep CORAL. We also consider first-order information, and minimize the distance of mean vectors between two domains. We build an end-to-end …
A long-standing issue with deep learning is the need for large and consistently labeled datasets. Although the current research in semi-supervised learning can decrease the required amount of annotated data by a factor of 10 or even more, this line of research still uses distinct classes like cats and dogs. However, in the real-world we often encounter problems where different experts have different opinions, thus producing fuzzy labels. We propose a novel framework for handling semi-supervised classifications of such fuzzy labels. Our framework is based on the idea of overclustering to detect…
The University of Western Australia（西澳大利亚大学）；Murdoch University（莫道克大学）
Deep residual networks have recently emerged as the state-of-the-art architecture in image segmentation and object detection. In this paper, we propose new image features (called ResFeats) extracted from the last convolutional layer of deep residual networks pre-trained on ImageNet. We propose to use ResFeats for diverse image classification tasks namely, object classification, scene classification and coral classification and show that ResFeats consistently perform better than their CNN counterparts on these classification tasks. Since the ResFeats are large feature vectors, we propose to use…
Kiel University（基尔大学）；Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；Laboratoire d’Océanographie de Villefranche（维尔弗朗什海洋学实验室）
Deep learning has been successfully applied to many classification problems including underwater challenges. However, a long-standing issue with deep learning is the need for large and consistently labeled datasets. Although current approaches in semi-supervised learning can decrease the required amount of annotated data by a factor of 10 or even more, this line of research still uses distinct classes. For underwater classification, and uncurated real-world datasets in general, clean class boundaries can often not be given due to a limited information content in the images and transitional sta…
Monitoring biodiversity is paramount to manage and protect natural resources. Collecting images of organisms over large temporal or spatial scales is a promising practice to monitor the biodiversity of natural ecosystems, providing large amounts of data with minimal interference with the environment. Deep learning models are currently used to automate classification of organisms into taxonomic units. However, imprecision in these classifiers introduces a measurement noise that is difficult to control and can significantly hinder the analysis and interpretation of data. {We overcome this limita…
University of Tehran（德黑兰大学）；University of Tennessee Health Science Center（田纳西大学健康科学中心）；Bangor University（班戈大学）；Vanderbilt Eye Institute（范德比尔特眼科研究所）
Domain adaptation is an attractive approach given the availability of a large amount of labeled data with similar properties but different domains. It is effective in image classification tasks where obtaining sufficient label data is challenging. We propose a novel method, named SELDA, for stacking ensemble learning via extending three domain adaptation methods for effectively solving real-world problems. The major assumption is that when base domain adaptation models are combined, we can obtain a more accurate and robust model by exploiting the ability of each of the base models. We extend M…
