A Novel Computer Vision Approach for Assessing Fish Responses to Intrusive Objects in Aquaculture

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Alvheim, Hanne-Grete, Jakobsen, Stian Mjelde, Føre, Martin, Kelasidi, Eleni
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916062301257728
author Alvheim, Hanne-Grete
Jakobsen, Stian Mjelde
Føre, Martin
Kelasidi, Eleni
author_facet Alvheim, Hanne-Grete
Jakobsen, Stian Mjelde
Føre, Martin
Kelasidi, Eleni
contents The aquaculture industry needs to address several challenges to secure sustainable seafood production that can serve an increasing global demand. One major challenge is to ensure good fish health and acceptable welfare during production since the improvement of fish welfare is of vital importance in current and future production systems. In this study, this is addressed by developing and implementing methods to identify fish behaviors in response to intrusive objects both on individual and on a group basis. A novel approach for detecting, tracking, and estimating the 3D position of individual fish has thus been developed, and specifically designed to track the caudal fins of farmed fish in industrial sea cages. The tracking data was subjected to a novel stereo-vision method adapted to estimate fish positions, velocities, accelerations, and turning and pitch angles. Datasets obtained from industrial-scale fish farms were then analyzed to identify the impact of structures of varying shapes, sizes, and colors on fish behavior. The method was trained using manually labeled caudal fins, and used YOLOv8 with ByteTrack as an object detector and tracker, SuperGlue for matching detections in the left and right frames, and triangulation to reconstruct the 3D positions of the fish. Different image pre-processing and augmentation methods for enhancing object detection accuracy were tested and their performance compared, while RAFT-Stereo was tested for depth estimation purposes. The obtained results both validate the method's performance against previous research efforts, and demonstrate the novelty and potential of this method in providing more insight into behavioral dynamics in sea-cages.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_30399
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Novel Computer Vision Approach for Assessing Fish Responses to Intrusive Objects in Aquaculture
Alvheim, Hanne-Grete
Jakobsen, Stian Mjelde
Føre, Martin
Kelasidi, Eleni
Quantitative Methods
Machine Learning
Image and Video Processing
The aquaculture industry needs to address several challenges to secure sustainable seafood production that can serve an increasing global demand. One major challenge is to ensure good fish health and acceptable welfare during production since the improvement of fish welfare is of vital importance in current and future production systems. In this study, this is addressed by developing and implementing methods to identify fish behaviors in response to intrusive objects both on individual and on a group basis. A novel approach for detecting, tracking, and estimating the 3D position of individual fish has thus been developed, and specifically designed to track the caudal fins of farmed fish in industrial sea cages. The tracking data was subjected to a novel stereo-vision method adapted to estimate fish positions, velocities, accelerations, and turning and pitch angles. Datasets obtained from industrial-scale fish farms were then analyzed to identify the impact of structures of varying shapes, sizes, and colors on fish behavior. The method was trained using manually labeled caudal fins, and used YOLOv8 with ByteTrack as an object detector and tracker, SuperGlue for matching detections in the left and right frames, and triangulation to reconstruct the 3D positions of the fish. Different image pre-processing and augmentation methods for enhancing object detection accuracy were tested and their performance compared, while RAFT-Stereo was tested for depth estimation purposes. The obtained results both validate the method's performance against previous research efforts, and demonstrate the novelty and potential of this method in providing more insight into behavioral dynamics in sea-cages.
title A Novel Computer Vision Approach for Assessing Fish Responses to Intrusive Objects in Aquaculture
topic Quantitative Methods
Machine Learning
Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30399