The Effect of Data Augmentation on the Accuracy of Fish Species Classification Using Deep Learning

Fish image classification presents an intriguing challenge in the field of computer vision. This research aims to develop an accurate classification model to differentiate between four different fish species using a convolutional neural network. The dataset used consists of $\mathbf{3 0 1 0}$ fish images, divided into training, validation, and testing sets. The convolutional neural network model was trained both with and without data augmentation. Evaluation results show that the model trained with data augmentation achieved an accuracy of $95 \%$ with a loss value of 0.0983, slightly better than the model without augmentation which achieved an accuracy of $94.56 \%$ with a loss value of $\mathbf{0. 1 7 9 4}$. This indicates that data augmentation techniques are effective in improving model performance, likely because augmentation helps the model generalize better to variations in fish image data. The results of this research demonstrate the significant potential of convolutional neural network for fish image classification tasks. The developed model can serve as a foundation for the development of computer vision-based applications such as automatic fish species identification in fisheries or educational applications. Further research can be conducted by exploring different convolutional neural network architectures, more advanced data augmentation techniques, and larger datasets to improve model performance.