Digital Camera Could Help Sort Fish, Save Stocks

MountainSplash writes "PlanetArk.com is carrying a story about a new camera that "takes a digital photograph of the catch which is then divided into a grid, allowing a computer to measure the shape and color of each fish in the grid. It needs one tenth of a second and identifies 98 percent of fish correctly." The claim is that fish can then be culled quicker possibly increasing the likelyhood of survival for the incidental catch in the net. Testing is being done by Norway's Institute of Marine Research and Norwegian marine electronics maker Scantrol. Onboard testing has proven highly successful, but underwater attempts still need more work. With everything we have all been seeing computers do the last few years, I personally found this to be one of the more interesting of late."

Comments

How and when is the picture taken?

[DRUNK_BEAR]

The story fails to mention when and how the picture is taken. I believe for this to be effective, no two fishes must be too close nor on top of each other. Anyone has more technical details on the process?

Some problems need to be sorted?

[banana fiend]

Aside from the pun, the camera can be linked to a sorting device - so that it can .... what? NOT dump the fish? Also, this reduces the waste to ... 25% - down from 33% - not a gigantic saving. Every little bit helps.

All in all, short on detail, and how it will reduce waste, lets see them sort the fish and reject the unwanted ones BEFORE the die from exhaustion on board

Is this the real problem?

[WayneConrad]

Is the real problem that we're killing too many of the fishes we didn't intend to catch? Or is it that we're catching too many fish?

Pattern matching

[CvD]

Gee, I wonder what kind of pattern matching/classification algorithm it is using. 98% is pretty damn high. Really high. That is a very robust algorithm indeed.

If it can be applied to fish, it can be applied to nearly any kind of object that needs to be identified. I would really like more technical details, as I am very sceptical of this 98% business.

Searching for 'automatic "fish classification"' doesn't turn up much...

I'm guessing it's a neural network or some other sort of classifier that has been trained with existing pictures of fish.

Use of technology

[SimianOverlord]

Hmmm...I'd read this as being more useful for scientific studies of fish stocks, rather than for the fishing industry. I mean, I'm sure both would find it useful, but the cost and reliability issues would rule it out for the majority of fishermen, as a few other posters have already said.

Good technology for scientists, especially if they are keen on returning live fish to the sea as far as is possible. Fish stock estimation is pretty unreliable as is, at least in the UK. Maybe something like this would help.