1,782 research outputs found
Towards Sustainable Oceans: Deep Learning Models for Accurate COTS Detection in Underwater Images
Object detection is one of the main tasks in computer vision, which includes image classification
and localization. The application of object detection is now widespread as it powers various applications such as self-driving cars, robotics, biometrics, surveillance, satellite image analysis, and in healthcare, to mention just a few. Deep learning has taken computer vision to a different
horizon. One of the areas that will benefit immensely from deep learning computer vision is the
detection of killer starfish, the crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS). For decades, this killer starfish
has dealt a big blow to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the world’s largest system of reefs, and in other places too. In addition to impacting negatively environmentally, it affects revenue
generation from reef tourism. Hence, reef managers and authorities want to control the populations of crown-of-thorns starfish, which have been observed to be the culprits. The deep learning
technique offers real-time and robust detection of this creature more than earlier traditional
methods that were used to detect these creatures.
This thesis work is part of a competition for a deep learning approach to detect COTS in
real time by building an object detector trained using underwater images. This offers a solution
to control the outbreaks in the population of these animals. Deep learning methods of Artificial
Intelligence (AI) have gained popularity today because of its speed and high accuracy in detection and have performed better than the earlier traditional methods. They can be used in
real-time object detection, and they owe their speed to convolutional neural networks (CNN).
The thesis gives a comprehensive literature review of the journey so far in the field of computer
vision and how deep learning methods can be applied to detect COTS. It also outlines the
steps involved in the implementation of the model using the state-of-the-art computer vision
algorithm known for its speed and accuracy – YOLOv8. The COTS detection model was trained
using the custom dataset provided by the organizers of the competition, harnessing the powers
of deep learning methods such as transfer learning, data augmentation, and preprocessing
of underwater images to achieve high accuracy.
Evaluation of the results obtained from the training showed a mean average precision of
0.803mAP at IoU of 0.5-0.95, acknowledging the detector model’s versatility in making accurate
detection at different confidence levels. This supports the hypothesis that when we use pre trained model, this enhances the performance of our model for better object detection tasks.
Certainly, better detection accuracy is one way to detect killer starfish, the crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS), and help protect the oceans
Deep learning based deep-sea automatic image enhancement and animal species classification
The automatic classification of marine species based on images is a challenging task for which multiple solutions have been increasingly provided in the past two decades. Oceans are complex ecosystems, difficult to access, and often the images obtained are of low quality. In such cases, animal classification becomes tedious. Therefore, it is often necessary to apply enhancement or pre-processing techniques to the images, before applying classification algorithms. In this work, we propose an image enhancement and classification pipeline that allows automated processing of images from benthic moving platforms. Deep-sea (870 m depth) fauna was targeted in footage taken by the crawler “Wally” (an Internet Operated Vehicle), within the Ocean Network Canada (ONC) area of Barkley Canyon (Vancouver, BC; Canada). The image enhancement process consists mainly of a convolutional residual network, capable of generating enhanced images from a set of raw images. The images generated by the trained convolutional residual network obtained high values in metrics for underwater imagery assessment such as UIQM (~ 2.585) and UCIQE (2.406). The highest SSIM and PSNR values were also obtained when compared to the original dataset. The entire process has shown good classification results on an independent test data set, with an accuracy value of 66.44% and an Area Under the ROC Curve (AUROC) value of 82.91%, which were subsequently improved to 79.44% and 88.64% for accuracy and AUROC respectively. These results obtained with the enhanced images are quite promising and superior to those obtained with the non-enhanced datasets, paving the strategy for the on-board real-time processing of crawler imaging, and outperforming those published in previous papers.This work was developed at Deusto Seidor S.A. (01015, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain) within the framework of the Tecnoterra (ICM-CSIC/UPC) and the following project activities: ARIM (Autonomous Robotic sea-floor Infrastructure for benthopelagic Monitoring); MarTERA ERA-Net Cofund; Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial, CDTI; and RESBIO (TEC2017-87861-R; Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades). This work was supported by the Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial (CDTI) (Grant No. EXP 00108707 / SERA-20181020)
DeepSeaNet: Improving Underwater Object Detection using EfficientDet
Marine animals and deep underwater objects are difficult to recognize and
monitor for safety of aquatic life. There is an increasing challenge when the
water is saline with granular particles and impurities. In such natural
adversarial environment, traditional approaches like CNN start to fail and are
expensive to compute. This project involves implementing and evaluating various
object detection models, including EfficientDet, YOLOv5, YOLOv8, and
Detectron2, on an existing annotated underwater dataset, called the
Brackish-Dataset. The dataset comprises annotated image sequences of fish,
crabs, starfish, and other aquatic animals captured in Limfjorden water with
limited visibility. The aim of this research project is to study the efficiency
of newer models on the same dataset and contrast them with the previous results
based on accuracy and inference time. Firstly, I compare the results of YOLOv3
(31.10% mean Average Precision (mAP)), YOLOv4 (83.72% mAP), YOLOv5 (97.6%),
YOLOv8 (98.20%), EfficientDet (98.56% mAP) and Detectron2 (95.20% mAP) on the
same dataset. Secondly, I provide a modified BiSkFPN mechanism (BiFPN neck with
skip connections) to perform complex feature fusion in adversarial noise which
makes modified EfficientDet robust to perturbations. Third, analyzed the effect
on accuracy of EfficientDet (98.63% mAP) and YOLOv5 by adversarial learning
(98.04% mAP). Last, I provide class activation map based explanations (CAM) for
the two models to promote Explainability in black box models. Overall, the
results indicate that modified EfficientDet achieved higher accuracy with
five-fold cross validation than the other models with 88.54% IoU of feature
maps
Deep learning with self-supervision and uncertainty regularization to count fish in underwater images
Effective conservation actions require effective population monitoring. However, accurately counting animals in the wild to inform conservation decision-making is difficult. Monitoring populations through image sampling has made data collection cheaper, wide-reaching and less intrusive but created a need to process and analyse this data efficiently. Counting animals from such data is challenging, particularly when densely packed in noisy images. Attempting this manually is slow and expensive, while traditional computer vision methods are limited in their generalisability. Deep learning is the state-of-the-art method for many computer vision tasks, but it has yet to be properly explored to count animals. To this end, we employ deep learning, with a density-based regression approach, to count fish in low-resolution sonar images. We introduce a large dataset of sonar videos, deployed to record wild Lebranche mullet schools (Mugil liza), with a subset of 500 labelled images. We utilise abundant unlabelled data in a self-supervised task to improve the supervised counting task. For the first time in this context, by introducing uncertainty quantification, we improve model training and provide an accompanying measure of prediction uncertainty for more informed biological decision-making. Finally, we demonstrate the generalisability of our proposed counting framework through testing it on a recent benchmark dataset of high-resolution annotated underwater images from varying habitats (DeepFish). From experiments on both contrasting datasets, we demonstrate our network outperforms the few other deep learning models implemented for solving this task. By providing an open-source framework along with training data, our study puts forth an efficient deep learning template for crowd counting aquatic animals thereby contributing effective methods to assess natural populations from the ever-increasing visual data
Whale Detection Enhancement through Synthetic Satellite Images
With a number of marine populations in rapid decline, collecting and
analyzing data about marine populations has become increasingly important to
develop effective conservation policies for a wide range of marine animals,
including whales. Modern computer vision algorithms allow us to detect whales
in images in a wide range of domains, further speeding up and enhancing the
monitoring process. However, these algorithms heavily rely on large training
datasets, which are challenging and time-consuming to collect particularly in
marine or aquatic environments. Recent advances in AI however have made it
possible to synthetically create datasets for training machine learning
algorithms, thus enabling new solutions that were not possible before. In this
work, we present a solution - SeaDroneSim2 benchmark suite, which addresses
this challenge by generating aerial, and satellite synthetic image datasets to
improve the detection of whales and reduce the effort required for training
data collection. We show that we can achieve a 15% performance boost on whale
detection compared to using the real data alone for training, by augmenting a
10% real data. We open source both the code of the simulation platform
SeaDroneSim2 and the dataset generated through it
Detectability of dolphins and turtles from Unoccupied Aerial Vehicle (UAV) survey imagery
For many decades occupied aircraft with trained observers have conducted aerial surveys of marine megafauna to estimate population size and dynamics. Recent technological advances mean that unoccupied aerial vehicles (UAVs) now provide a potential alternative to occupied surveys, eliminating some of the disadvantages of occupied surveys such as risk to human life, weather constraints and cost. In this study, data collected from an occupied aircraft (at 500 ft) and a UAV (at 1400 ft) flown at the same time, deployed for counting dugongs, were compared for detecting dolphins and turtles within Shark Bay, Western Australia. The UAV images were manually reviewed post hoc to count the animals sighted and the environmental conditions (visibility, sea state, cloud cover and glare) had been classified by the occupied teams’ data for each image. The UAV captured more sightings (174 dolphins and 368 turtles) than were recorded by the flight team (93 dolphins and 312 turtles). Larger aggregations (>10 animals) were also found in the UAV images (5 aggregations of dolphins and turtles) compared to the occupied teams sightings (0 dolphins and 3 aggregations of turtles). A generalised linear mixed model determined that turtle detection was significantly affected by visibility, while cloud cover, sea state and visibility significantly affected dolphin detection in both platforms. An expert survey of 120 images was also conducted to determine the image ground sampling distance (GSD; four levels from 1.7 to 3.5 cm/pixel) needed to identify dolphin and turtles to species. At 3 cm/pixel only 40% of the dolphins and turtles were identified to species with a reasonable level of certainty (>75% certainty). This study demonstrated that UAVs can be successfully deployed for detecting dolphins and turtles and that a GSD of 1.7 – 3cm/pixel is too low resolution to effectively identify dolphin and turtle species. Overcoming the limitations imposed on UAVs such as aviator regulatory bodies and payload capabilities will make UAVs a pivotal tool for future research, conservation, and management
A Gated Cross-domain Collaborative Network for Underwater Object Detection
Underwater object detection (UOD) plays a significant role in aquaculture and
marine environmental protection. Considering the challenges posed by low
contrast and low-light conditions in underwater environments, several
underwater image enhancement (UIE) methods have been proposed to improve the
quality of underwater images. However, only using the enhanced images does not
improve the performance of UOD, since it may unavoidably remove or alter
critical patterns and details of underwater objects. In contrast, we believe
that exploring the complementary information from the two domains is beneficial
for UOD. The raw image preserves the natural characteristics of the scene and
texture information of the objects, while the enhanced image improves the
visibility of underwater objects. Based on this perspective, we propose a Gated
Cross-domain Collaborative Network (GCC-Net) to address the challenges of poor
visibility and low contrast in underwater environments, which comprises three
dedicated components. Firstly, a real-time UIE method is employed to generate
enhanced images, which can improve the visibility of objects in low-contrast
areas. Secondly, a cross-domain feature interaction module is introduced to
facilitate the interaction and mine complementary information between raw and
enhanced image features. Thirdly, to prevent the contamination of unreliable
generated results, a gated feature fusion module is proposed to adaptively
control the fusion ratio of cross-domain information. Our method presents a new
UOD paradigm from the perspective of cross-domain information interaction and
fusion. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GCC-Net achieves
state-of-the-art performance on four underwater datasets
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