Title
Automated fish age estimation from otolith images using statistical learning
Abstract
The acquisition of age and growth data is of key importance for fisheries research (assessment, marine ecology issues, etc.). Consequently, automating this task is of great interest. In this paper, we investigate the use of statistical learning techniques for fish age estimation. The core of this study lies in the definition of relevant image-related features. We rely on the computation of a 1D representation summing up the content of otolith images within a predefined area of interest. Features are then extracted from this non-stationary representation depicting the alternation of seasonal growth rings. Thus, fish age estimation can be viewed as a multi-class classification issue using statistical learning strategies. In particular, a procedure based on demodulation and remodulation of fish growth patterns is used to improve the generalization properties of the trained classifiers. The experimental evaluation is carried out over a dataset of 320 plaice otolith images from age groups 1–6. We analyze both, the performances of several statistical classifiers, namely SVMs (support vector machines) and neural networks, and the relevance of the proposed image-based feature sets. In addition, the combination of additional biological and shape features to the image-related ones is considered. We reach a rate of correct age estimation of 88% w.r.t. the expert ground truth. This demonstrates the relevance of the proposed approach for the automation of routine aging and for computer-assisted aging.
Year
DOI
Venue
2004
10.1016/j.fishres.2004.10.008
Fisheries Research
Keywords
Field
DocType
Automated fish aging,Statistical learning,Otolith images,Performance evaluation,Plaice dataset
Data mining,Biology,Automation,Statistical learning,Otolith,Artificial intelligence,Artificial neural network,Computation,Alternation (linguistics),Fishery,Pattern recognition,Support vector machine,Ground truth
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
72
2
0165-7836
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.42
3
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ronan Fablet11026.88
N LEJOSSE220.42