Active detection for fish species recognition in underwater environments

Fish species must be identified for stock assessments, ecosystem monitoring, production management, and the conservation of endangered species. Implementing algorithms for fish species detection in underwater settings like the Gulf of Mexico poses a formidable challenge. Active learning, a method that efficiently identifies informative samples for annotation while staying within a budget, has demonstrated its effectiveness in the context of object detection in recent times. In this study, we present an active detection model designed for fish species recognition in underwater environments. This model can be employed as an object detection system to effectively lower the expense associated with manual annotation. It uses epistemic uncertainty with Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) and proposes a novel module denoted as Model Evidence Head (MEH) for fish species detection in underwater environments. It employs Hierarchical Uncertainty Aggregation (HUA) to obtain the informativeness of an image. We conducted experiments using a fine-grained and extensive dataset of reef fish collected from the Gulf of Mexico, specifically the Southeast Area Monitoring and Assessment Program Dataset 2021 (SEAMAPD21). The experimental results demonstrate that an active detection framework achieves better detection performance on the SEAMAPD21 dataset demonstrating a favorable balance between performance and data efficiency for underwater fish species recognition.