CatchMonitor: a machine learning system for automated fish discard quantification

Abstract

We report on the continued development of CatchMonitor, resulting in a prototype computer vision system designed to automatically quantify discarded fish from video footage collected from Remote Electronic Monitoring (REM) systems on fishing trawlers. The analysis of trawler surveillance footage is a challenging problem due to the real-world conditions on board fishing vessels. Building on our prior work we improve the accuracy of species identification through the application of semi-supervised learning. We utilise a simple and robust object tracking approach, upon which we build our prototype discard quantification system. Finally we analyse the variability of manual discard quantification performed by multiple expert human analysts, using it as a benchmark against which we compare the performance of our system.