Efficient Data Acquisition and CNN Design for Fish Species Classification in Inland Waters

We propose appropriate criteria for obtaining fish species data and number of learning data, as well as for selecting the most appropriate convolutional neural network (CNN) to efficiently classify exotic invasive fish species for their extermination. The acquisition of large amounts of fish species data for CNN learning is subject to several constraints. To solve these problems, we acquired a large number of fish images for various fish species in a laboratory environment, rather than a natural environment. We then converted the obtained fish images into fish images acquired in different natural environments through simple image synthesis to obtain the image data of the fish species. We used the images of largemouth bass and bluegill captured at a pond as test data to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method. In addition, to classify the exotic invasive fish species accurately, we evaluated the trained CNNs in terms of classification performance, processing time, and the number of data; consequently, we proposed a method to select the most effective CNN.