An Improved Deep Learning Model for Underwater Species Recognition in Aquaculture

The ability to differentiate between various fish species plays an essential role in aquaculture. It helps to protect their populations and monitor their health situations and their nutrient systems. However, old machine learning methods are unable to detect objects in images with complex backgrounds and especially in low-light conditions. This paper aims to improve the performance of a YOLO v5 model for fish recognition and classification. In the context of transfer learning, our improved model FishDETECT uses the pre-trained FishMask model. Then it is tested in various complex scenes. The experimental results show that FishDETECT is more effective than a simple YOLO v5 model. Using the evaluation metrics Precision, Recall, and mAP50, our new model achieved accuracy rates of 0.962, 0.978, and 0.995, respectively.