Integrating Edge-Intelligence in AUV for Real-Time Fish Hotspot Identification and Fish Species Classification

Abstract

Enhancing the livelihood environment for fishermen’s communities with the rapid technological growth is essential in the marine sector. Among the various issues in the fishing industry, fishing zone identification and fish catch detection play a significant role in the fishing community. In this work, the automated prediction of potential fishing zones and classification of fish species in an aquatic environment through machine learning algorithms is developed and implemented. A prototype of the boat structure is designed and developed with lightweight wooden material encompassing all necessary sensors and cameras. The functions of the unmanned boat (FishID-AUV) are based on the user’s control through a user-friendly mobile/web application (APP). The different features impacting the identification of hotspots are considered, and feature selection is performed using various classifier-based learning algorithms, namely, Naive Bayes, Nearest neighbors, Random Forest and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The performance of classifications are compared. From the real-time results, it is clear that the Naive Bayes classification model is found to provide better accuracy, which is employed in the application platform for predicting the potential fishing zone. After identifying the first catch, the species are classified using an AlexNet-based deep Convolutional Neural Network. Also, the user can fetch real-time information such as the status of fishing through live video streaming to determine the quality and quantity of fish along with information like pH, temperature and humidity. The proposed work is implemented in a real-time boat structure prototype and is validated with data from sensors and satellites.