Artificial Intelligence Applications in True Crabs (Brachyura) Across Aquaculture, Fisheries, Ecology, and Processing: A Scoping Review

Artificial intelligence is increasingly applied to crab research, yet no prior review has mapped this work or its progress toward real-world use. This scoping review maps artificial intelligence applications in true crabs (Brachyura) across aquaculture, fisheries, ecology, and processing. Following the PRISMA extension for Scoping Reviews, five databases were searched for records published from 2016 to 14 June 2026, yielding 11,172 records, most from databases whose broad field coverage returned papers mentioning crabs or artificial intelligence only in passing. Of these, 88 peer-reviewed English-language primary studies applying artificial intelligence to brachyuran data and reporting at least one quantitative performance metric were included. Each study was charted for species, task domain, model architecture, dataset, performance, and deployment maturity (Technology Readiness Level). The literature is young and expanding rapidly, with nearly half published since 2025, and heavily concentrated, with China contributing most affiliations and three species accounting for more than two-thirds of studies. Twelve task domains were identified, dominated by quality assessment and sex classification. The field has converged on object detectors with attention modules, but accuracy is rarely comparable because datasets and protocols are proprietary. Most systems remain at laboratory validation. Reported accuracy has therefore advanced faster than demonstrated deployment.