Deep learning with self-supervision and uncertainty regularization to count fish in underwater images
Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学）；Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina（圣卡塔琳娜联邦大学）；Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior（马克斯·普朗克动物行为研究所）；Universidade Federal do Paraná（巴拉那联邦大学）；Witwatersrand University（威特沃特斯兰德大学）；Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学）
Penny Tarling, Mauricio Cantor, Albert Clapés, Sergio Escalera
Effective conservation actions require effective population monitoring. However, accurately counting animals in the wild to inform conservation decision-making is difficult. Monitoring populations through image sampling has made data collection cheaper, wide-reaching and less intrusive but created a need to process and analyse this data efficiently. Counting animals from such data is challenging, particularly when densely packed in noisy images. Attempting this manually is slow and expensive, while traditional computer vision methods are limited in their generalisability. Deep learning is the state-of-the-art method for many computer vision tasks, but it has yet to be properly explored to count animals. To this end, we employ deep learning, with a density-based regression approach, to count fish in low-resolution sonar images. We introduce a large dataset of sonar videos, deployed to record wild mullet schools (Mugil liza), with a subset of 500 labelled images. We utilise abundant unlabelled data in a self-supervised task to improve the supervised counting task. For the first time in this context, by introducing uncertainty quantification, we improve model training and provide an accompanying measure of prediction uncertainty for more informed biological decision-making. Finally, we demonstrate the generalisability of our proposed counting framework through testing it on a recent benchmark dataset of high-resolution annotated underwater images from varying habitats (DeepFish). From experiments on both contrasting datasets, we demonstrate our network outperforms the few other deep learning models implemented for solving this task. By providing an open-source framework along with training data, our study puts forth an efficient deep learning template for crowd counting aquatic animals thereby contributing effective methods to assess natural populations from the ever-increasing visual data.
James Cook University（詹姆斯库克大学）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Element AI
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 da…
Active learning (AL) aims to minimize labeling efforts for data-demanding deep neural networks (DNNs) by selecting the most representative data points for annotation. However, currently used methods are ill-equipped to deal with biased data. The main motivation of this paper is to consider a realistic setting for pool-based semi-supervised AL, where the unlabeled collection of train data is biased. We theoretically derive an optimal acquisition function for AL in this setting. It can be formulated as distribution shift minimization between unlabeled train data and weakly-labeled validation dat…
Marine scientists use remote underwater video recording to survey fish species in their natural habitats. This helps them understand and predict 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. A promising method to address this problem is the cutting-edge Deep Learning (DL) technology.DL can help marine scien…
James Cook University（詹姆斯·库克大学）；National Research Council of Italy（意大利国家研究委员会）
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…
Griffith University（格里菲斯大学）；Australian Rivers Institute（澳大利亚河流研究所）；University of the Sunshine Coast（阳光海岸大学）
Uses of underwater videos to assess diversity and abundance of fish are being rapidly adopted by marine biologists. Manual processing of videos for quantification by human analysts is time and labour intensive. Automatic processing of videos can be employed to achieve the objectives in a cost and time-efficient way. The aim is to build an accurate and reliable fish detection and recognition system, which is important for an autonomous robotic platform. However, there are many challenges involved in this task (e.g. complex background, deformation, low resolution and light propagation). Recent a…
Live fish recognition is one of the most crucial elements of fisheries survey applications where vast amount of data are rapidly acquired. Different from general scenarios, challenges to underwater image recognition are posted by poor image quality, uncontrolled objects and environment, as well as difficulty in acquiring representative samples. Also, most existing feature extraction techniques are hindered from automation due to involving human supervision. Toward this end, we propose an underwater fish recognition framework that consists of a fully unsupervised feature learning technique and …
The target of this paper is to recommend a way for Automated classification of Fish species. A high accuracy fish classification is required for greater understanding of fish behavior in Ichthyology and by marine biologists. Maintaining a ledger of the number of fishes per species and marking the endangered species in large and small water bodies is required by concerned institutions. Majority of available methods focus on classification of fishes outside of water because underwater classification poses challenges such as background noises, distortion of images, the presence of other water bod…
eStonefish-Scenes: A Sim-to-Real Validated and Robot-Centric Event-based Optical Flow Dataset for Underwater Vehicles
Robotics Research Institute (ViCOROB), Universitat de Girona (UdG), Spain 2 School of Engineering \& Physical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK
Clean energy from oceans and rivers is becoming a reality with the development of new technologies like tidal and instream turbines that generate electricity from naturally flowing water. These new technologies are being monitored for effects on fish and other wildlife using underwater video. Methods for automated analysis of underwater video are needed to lower the costs of analysis and improve accuracy. A deep learning model, YOLO, was trained to recognize fish in underwater video using three very different datasets recorded at real-world water power sites. Training and testing with examples…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；National Taipei University of Technology（国立台北科技大学）；Alaska Fisheries Science Center（阿拉斯加渔业科学中心）
Fishery surveys that call for the use of single or multiple underwater cameras have been an emerging technology as a non-extractive mean to estimate the abundance of fish stocks. Tracking live fish in an open aquatic environment posts challenges that are different from general pedestrian or vehicle tracking in surveillance applications. In many rough habitats fish are monitored by cameras installed on moving platforms, where tracking is even more challenging due to inapplicability of background models. In this paper, a novel tracking algorithm based on the deformable multiple kernels (DMK) is …
Overcoming Annotation Bottlenecks in Underwater Fish Segmentation: A Robust Self-Supervised Learning Approach
College of Science and Engineering, James Cook University（詹姆斯库克大学科学与工程学院）；ARC Research Hub for Supercharging Tropical Aquaculture through Genetic Solutions, James Cook University（詹姆斯库克大学ARC热带水产养殖基因解决方案研究中心）
Closer to Ground Truth: Realistic Shape and Appearance Labeled Data Generation for Unsupervised Underwater Image Segmentation
NORCE Norwegian Research Center AS（NORCE挪威研究中心）；National University of Science and Technology "Politehnica" Bucharest（布加勒斯特理工科学技术大学）；"Simion Stoilow" Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy（罗马尼亚科学院西米翁斯托伊洛夫数学研究所）
Marine ecosystems and their fish habitats are becoming increasingly important due to their integral role in providing a valuable food source and conservation outcomes. Due to their remote and difficult to access nature, marine environments and fish habitats are often monitored using underwater cameras. These cameras generate a massive volume of digital data, which cannot be efficiently analysed by current manual processing methods, which involve a human observer. DL is a cutting-edge AI technology that has demonstrated unprecedented performance in analysing visual data. Despite its application…
UNC Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）
To quantify how well natural language understanding models can capture consistency in a general conversation, we introduce the DialoguE COntradiction DEtection task (DECODE) and a new conversational dataset containing both human-human and human-bot contradictory dialogues. We then compare a structured utterance-based approach of using pre-trained Transformer models for contradiction detection with the typical unstructured approach. Results reveal that: (i) our newly collected dataset is notably more effective at providing supervision for the dialogue contradiction detection task than existing …
FinSight-Net:A Physics-Aware Decoupled Network with Frequency-Domain Compensation for Underwater Fish Detection in Smart Aquaculture
Dalian Key Laboratory of Smart Fishery（大连智能渔业重点实验室）；College of Information Engineering, Dalian Ocean University（大连海洋大学信息工程学院）；Key Laboratory of Environment Controlled Aquaculture（环境可控养殖重点实验室）；Dalian Polytechnic University School of International Education（大连职业技术学院国际教育学院）
RGB-D Indiscernible Object Counting in Underwater Scenes
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence, University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学先锋人工智能中心）；School of Telecommunications and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications（南京邮电大学通信与信息工程学院）；College of Computer Science, Nankai University（南开大学计算机学院）
A Generative Data Framework with Authentic Supervision for Underwater Image Restoration and Enhancement
Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom（人工智能研究院（TeleAI），中国电信）；Department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（自动化系，上海交通大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and ElectroNics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University（人工智能、光学与电子学学院（iOPEN），西北工业大学）；Xi’an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（西安光学精密机械研究所，中国科学院）
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Alaska Fisheries Science Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration（美国国家海洋和大气管理局阿拉斯加渔业科学中心）
Non-extractive fish abundance estimation with the aid of visual analysis has drawn increasing attention. Unstable illumination, ubiquitous noise and low frame rate video capturing in the underwater environment, however, make conventional tracking methods unreliable. In this paper, we present a multiple fish tracking system for low-contrast and low-frame-rate stereo videos with the use of a trawl-based underwater camera system. An automatic fish segmentation algorithm overcomes the low-contrast issues by adopting a histogram backprojection approach on double local-thresholded images to ensure a…
With the growth of sensing, control and robotic technologies, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have become useful assistants to human divers for performing various underwater operations. In the current practice, the divers are required to carry expensive, bulky, and waterproof keyboards or joystick-based controllers for supervision and control of AUVs. Therefore, diver action-based supervision is becoming increasingly popular because it is convenient, easier to use, faster, and cost effective. However, the various environmental, diver and sensing uncertainties present underwater makes it …
EPANet: Efficient Path Aggregation Network for Underwater Fish Detection
Dalian Key Laboratory of Smart Fishery（大连智能渔业重点实验室）；College of Information Engineering, Dalian Ocean University（大连海洋大学信息工程学院）；Key Laboratory of Environment Controlled Aquaculture（环境可控水产养殖重点实验室）；Dalian Polytechnic University School of International Education（大连职业技术学院国际教育学院）
CIDCO - Development Center for Ocean Mapping（CIDCO——海洋测绘开发中心）
This paper details a new method to recognize and detect underwater objects in real-time sidescan sonar data imagery streams, with case-studies of applications for underwater archeology, and ghost fishing gear retrieval. We first synthesize images from sidescan data, apply geometric and radiometric corrections, then use 2D feature detection algorithms to identify point clouds of descriptive visual microfeatures such as corners and edges in the sonar images. We then apply a clustering algorithm on the feature point clouds to group feature sets into regions of interest, reject false positives, yi…
In this paper, we present a methodology for fisheries-related data that allows us to converge on a labeled image dataset by iterating over the dataset with multiple training and production loops that can exploit crowdsourcing interfaces. We present our algorithm and its results on two separate sets of image data collected using the Seabed autonomous underwater vehicle. The first dataset comprises of 2,026 completely unlabeled images, while the second consists of 21,968 images that were point annotated by experts. Our results indicate that training with a small subset and iterating on that to b…
Aalborg University（奥尔堡大学）；Pioneer Center for AI（人工智能先锋中心）
There exist no publicly available annotated underwater multi-object tracking (MOT) datasets captured in turbid environments. To remedy this we propose the BrackishMOT dataset with focus on tracking schools of small fish, which is a notoriously difficult MOT task. BrackishMOT consists of 98 sequences captured in the wild. Alongside the novel dataset, we present baseline results by training a state-of-the-art tracker. Additionally, we propose a framework for creating synthetic sequences in order to expand the dataset. The framework consists of animated fish models and realistic underwater enviro…
Huazhong Institute of Electro-Optics（华中光电技术研究所）；Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics（武汉光电国家实验室）；Harbin Engineering University（哈尔滨工程大学）
In real-world underwater environment, exploration of seabed resources, underwater archaeology, and underwater fishing rely on a variety of sensors, vision sensor is the most important one due to its high information content, non-intrusive, and passive nature. However, wavelength-dependent light attenuation and back-scattering result in color distortion and haze effect, which degrade the visibility of images. To address this problem, firstly, we proposed an unsupervised generative adversarial network (GAN) for generating realistic underwater images (color distortion and haze effect) from in-air…
How to Track and Segment Fish without Human Annotations: A Self-Supervised Deep Learning Approach
College of Science and Engineering, James Cook University（詹姆斯库克大学科学与工程学院）；ARC Research Hub for Supercharging Tropical Aquaculture through Genetic Solutions, James Cook University（詹姆斯库克大学ARC热带水产养殖遗传解决方案研究中心）
Element AI；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；James Cook University（詹姆斯·库克大学）
Aquaculture industries rely on the availability of accurate fish body measurements, e.g., length, width and mass. Manual methods that rely on physical tools like rulers are time and labour intensive. Leading automatic approaches rely on fully-supervised segmentation models to acquire these measurements but these require collecting per-pixel labels -- also time consuming and laborious: i.e., it can take up to two minutes per fish to generate accurate segmentation labels, almost always requiring at least some manual intervention. We propose an automatic segmentation model efficiently trained on …
Underwater automatic target recognition (UATR) has been a challenging research topic in ocean engineering. Although deep learning brings opportunities for target recognition on land and in the air, underwater target recognition techniques based on deep learning have lagged due to sensor performance and the size of trainable data. This letter proposed a framework for learning the visual representation of underwater acoustic imageries, which takes a transformer-based style transfer model as the main body. It could replace the low-level texture features of optical images with the visual features …
In this paper, we present the first large-scale dataset for semantic Segmentation of Underwater IMagery (SUIM). It contains over 1500 images with pixel annotations for eight object categories: fish (vertebrates), reefs (invertebrates), aquatic plants, wrecks/ruins, human divers, robots, and sea-floor. The images have been rigorously collected during oceanic explorations and human-robot collaborative experiments, and annotated by human participants. We also present a benchmark evaluation of state-of-the-art semantic segmentation approaches based on standard performance metrics. In addition, we …
Valeo und Schalter und Sensoren GmbH（法雷奥开关与传感器有限公司）；Valeo Vision Systems（法雷奥视觉系统公司）；Technische University, Chemnitz（开姆尼茨工业大学）
Near field depth estimation around a self driving car is an important function that can be achieved by four wide angle fisheye cameras having a field of view of over 180. Depth estimation based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) produce state of the art results, but progress is hindered because depth annotation cannot be obtained manually. Synthetic datasets are commonly used but they have limitations. For instance, they do not capture the extensive variability in the appearance of objects like vehicles present in real datasets. There is also a domain shift while performing inference on n…
Nankai University（南开大学）；Hisilicon Technologies Co. Ltd.（海思技术有限公司）；Henan Institute of Science and Technology（河南科技学院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
In this paper, we present a ranking-based underwater image quality assessment (UIQA) method, abbreviated as URanker. The URanker is built on the efficient conv-attentional image Transformer. In terms of underwater images, we specially devise (1) the histogram prior that embeds the color distribution of an underwater image as histogram token to attend global degradation and (2) the dynamic cross-scale correspondence to model local degradation. The final prediction depends on the class tokens from different scales, which comprehensively considers multi-scale dependencies. With the margin ranking…
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…
Fuzhou University（福州大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学）；Beijing Artificial Intelligence Institute（北京人工智能研究院）；Université de Nantes（南特大学）；Laboratoire des Sciences du Numérique de Nantes（南特数字科学实验室）
The widespread image applications have greatly promoted the vision-based tasks, in which the Image Quality Assessment (IQA) technique has become an increasingly significant issue. For user enjoyment in multimedia systems, the IQA exploits image fidelity and aesthetics to characterize user experience; while for other tasks such as popular object recognition, there exists a low correlation between utilities and perceptions. In such cases, the fidelity-based and aesthetics-based IQA methods cannot be directly applied. To address this issue, this paper proposes a utility-oriented IQA in object rec…
Underwater Variable Zoom: Depth-Guided Perception Network for Underwater Image Enhancement
School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学计算机科学与技术学院）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong Technology and Business University（山东工商学院计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Information and Communication Engineering, Dalian Minzu University（大连民族大学信息与通信工程学院）；School of Innovation Experiment, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学创新实验学院）
LUIEO: A Lightweight Model for Integrating Underwater Image Enhancement and Object Detection
School of Mathematics, North University of China（中北大学数学学院）；College of Computer and Information Technology, Shanxi University（山西大学计算机与信息技术学院）；School of Mathematics Sciences, Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学数学科学学院）
DTU Electrical Engineering Technical University of Denmark（丹麦技术大学电气工程学院）；AUV Competence Centre ATLAS MARIDAN ApS（ATLAS MARIDAN自主水下航行器能力中心有限公司）
Low-bandwidth communication, such as underwater acoustic communication, is limited by best-case data rates of 30--50 kbit/s. This renders such channels unusable or inefficient at best for single image, video, or other bandwidth-demanding sensor-data transmission. To combat data-transmission bottlenecks, we consider practical use-cases within the maritime domain and investigate the prospect of Single Image Super-Resolution methodologies. This is investigated on a large, diverse dataset obtained during years of trawl fishing where cameras have been placed in the fishing nets. We propose down-sam…
3D-USE: From Image-Level to Scene-Level Underwater Enhancement
College of Computer Science, Nankai University（南开大学计算机学院）；NKIARI（南开大学人工智能研究院（深圳））；School of Automation, Southeast University（东南大学自动化学院）；Advanced Ocean Institute of Southeast University, Nantong（东南大学南通先进海洋研究院）
HybrUR: A Hybrid Physical-Neural Solution for Unsupervised Underwater Image Restoration
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Fuzhou University（福州大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Peking University（北京大学）
