Abstract

This paper presents SAFE, a prototype system for supporting the fish landings control of small-scale fishing boats in Chile. SAFE is a modern solution for fishery inspection that automatically discriminates fish species using machine learning. Here, we present a version of SAFE that classifies five target pelagic fish species in Chile: anchovy, Chilean jack mackerel, hake, mote sculpin, and sardine. The system has two stages; the first detects and segments all fish appearing in an image. These segmented images then feed the second stage, which perform species classification. A database of approximately 266 images from these five fish species was constructed for training, validation, and testing purposes. For the fish detection stage, we exploited transfer learning to train Mask R-CNN architectures, an instance segmentation model. As for the fish species classification stage, we exploited transfer learning to train ResNet50 and VGG16 deep learning architectures. Results show that SAFE achieves between 90% and 96.3% macro-average precision (MP) when classifying the five fish species mentioned above. The best architecture, composed of a Mask R-CNN-based detector and a VGG16-based classifier, achieves an MP of 96.3%, which could process a single fish as quick as 16.67 FPS, and one whole 1920x1080-pixel image as quick as 2 FPS.