Fish species identification on low resolution—a study with enhanced super-resolution generative adversarial network (ESRGAN), YOLO and VGG-16

An intelligent detection and recognition model for the fish species from camera footage is urgently required as fishery contributes to a large portion of the world economy, and these kinds of advanced models can aid fishermen on a large scale. Such models incorporating a pick-and-place machine can be beneficial to sorting different fish species in bulk without human intervention, significantly reducing costs for large-scale fishing industries. Existing methods for detecting and recognizing fish species have many limitations, such as limited scalability, detection accuracy, failure to detect multiple species, degraded performance at a lower resolution, or pinpointing the exact location of the fish. Modifying the head of a compelling deep learning model, namely VGG-16, with pre-trained weights, can be used to detect both the species of the fish and find the exact location of the fish in an image by implementing a modified You Only Look Once (YOLO) to incorporate the bounding box regression head. We have proposed using the Enhanced Super Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (ESRGAN) algorithm and the proposed neural network to amplify the image resolution by a factor of 4. With this method, an overall detection accuracy of 96.5% has been obtained. The experiment has been conducted based on a total of 9,460 images spread across nine species. After further improving the model, a pick-and-place machine could be integrated to quickly sort the fish according to their species in different large-scale fish industries.