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

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.